Daily Papers

Most algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL) require that the objective is formalised with a Markovian reward function. However, it is well-known that certain tasks cannot be expressed by means of an objective in the Markov rewards formalism, motivating the study of alternative objective-specification formalisms in RL such as Linear Temporal Logic and Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning. To date, there has not yet been any thorough analysis of how these formalisms relate to each other in terms of their expressivity. We fill this gap in the existing literature by providing a comprehensive comparison of 17 salient objective-specification formalisms. We place these formalisms in a preorder based on their expressive power, and present this preorder as a Hasse diagram. We find a variety of limitations for the different formalisms, and argue that no formalism is both dominantly expressive and straightforward to optimise with current techniques. For example, we prove that each of Regularised RL, (Outer) Nonlinear Markov Rewards, Reward Machines, Linear Temporal Logic, and Limit Average Rewards can express a task that the others cannot. The significance of our results is twofold. First, we identify important expressivity limitations to consider when specifying objectives for policy optimization. Second, our results highlight the need for future research which adapts reward learning to work with a greater variety of formalisms, since many existing reward learning methods assume that the desired objective takes a Markovian form. Our work contributes towards a more cohesive understanding of the costs and benefits of different RL objective-specification formalisms.

The sampling of probability distributions specified up to a normalization constant is an important problem in both machine learning and statistical mechanics. While classical stochastic sampling methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or Langevin Dynamics (LD) can suffer from slow mixing times there is a growing interest in using normalizing flows in order to learn the transformation of a simple prior distribution to the given target distribution. Here we propose a generalized and combined approach to sample target densities: Stochastic Normalizing Flows (SNF) -- an arbitrary sequence of deterministic invertible functions and stochastic sampling blocks. We show that stochasticity overcomes expressivity limitations of normalizing flows resulting from the invertibility constraint, whereas trainable transformations between sampling steps improve efficiency of pure MCMC/LD along the flow. By invoking ideas from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics we derive an efficient training procedure by which both the sampler's and the flow's parameters can be optimized end-to-end, and by which we can compute exact importance weights without having to marginalize out the randomness of the stochastic blocks. We illustrate the representational power, sampling efficiency and asymptotic correctness of SNFs on several benchmarks including applications to sampling molecular systems in equilibrium.

The expressivity of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is dependent on the aggregation functions they employ. Theoretical works have pointed towards Sum aggregation GNNs subsuming every other GNNs, while certain practical works have observed a clear advantage to using Mean and Max. An examination of the theoretical guarantee identifies two caveats. First, it is size-restricted, that is, the power of every specific GNN is limited to graphs of a specific size. Successfully processing larger graphs may require an other GNN, and so on. Second, it concerns the power to distinguish non-isomorphic graphs, not the power to approximate general functions on graphs, and the former does not necessarily imply the latter. It is desired that a GNN's usability will not be limited to graphs of any specific size. Therefore, we explore the realm of unrestricted-size expressivity. We prove that basic functions, which can be computed exactly by Mean or Max GNNs, are inapproximable by any Sum GNN. We prove that under certain restrictions, every Mean or Max GNN can be approximated by a Sum GNN, but even there, a combination of (Sum, [Mean/Max]) is more expressive than Sum alone. Lastly, we prove further expressivity limitations for GNNs with a broad class of aggregations.

Modern vision models have achieved remarkable success in benchmarks where local features provide critical information about the target. There is now a growing interest in solving tasks that require more global reasoning, where local features offer no significant information. These tasks are reminiscent of the connectivity tasks discussed by Minsky and Papert in 1969, which exposed the limitations of the perceptron model and contributed to the first AI winter. In this paper, we revisit such tasks by introducing four global visual benchmarks involving path findings and mazes. We show that: (1) although today's large vision models largely surpass the expressivity limitations of the early models, they still struggle with the learning efficiency; we put forward the "globality degree" notion to understand this limitation; (2) we then demonstrate that the picture changes and global reasoning becomes feasible with the introduction of "visual scratchpads"; similarly to the text scratchpads and chain-of-thoughts used in language models, visual scratchpads help break down global tasks into simpler ones; (3) we finally show that some scratchpads are better than others, in particular, "inductive scratchpads" that take steps relying on less information afford better out-of-distribution generalization and succeed for smaller model sizes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities in various tasks, yet their vast parameter sizes restrict their applicability in resource-constrained settings. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a viable solution by transferring expertise from large teacher models to compact student models. However, traditional KD techniques face specific challenges when applied to LLMs, including restricted access to LLM outputs, significant teacher-student capacity gaps, and the inherited mis-calibration issue. In this work, we present PLaD, a novel preference-based LLM distillation framework. PLaD exploits the teacher-student capacity discrepancy to generate pseudo-preference pairs where teacher outputs are preferred over student outputs. Then, PLaD leverages a ranking loss to re-calibrate student's estimation of sequence likelihood, which steers the student's focus towards understanding the relative quality of outputs instead of simply imitating the teacher. PLaD bypasses the need for access to teacher LLM's internal states, tackles the student's expressivity limitations, and mitigates the student mis-calibration issue. Through extensive experiments on two sequence generation tasks and with various LLMs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PLaD framework.

Convex relaxations are a key component of training and certifying provably safe neural networks. However, despite substantial progress, a wide and poorly understood accuracy gap to standard networks remains, raising the question of whether this is due to fundamental limitations of convex relaxations. Initial work investigating this question focused on the simple and widely used IBP relaxation. It revealed that some univariate, convex, continuous piecewise linear (CPWL) functions cannot be encoded by any ReLU network such that its IBP-analysis is precise. To explore whether this limitation is shared by more advanced convex relaxations, we conduct the first in-depth study on the expressive power of ReLU networks across all commonly used convex relaxations. We show that: (i) more advanced relaxations allow a larger class of univariate functions to be expressed as precisely analyzable ReLU networks, (ii) more precise relaxations can allow exponentially larger solution spaces of ReLU networks encoding the same functions, and (iii) even using the most precise single-neuron relaxations, it is impossible to construct precisely analyzable ReLU networks that express multivariate, convex, monotone CPWL functions.

Characterizing neural networks in terms of better-understood formal systems has the potential to yield new insights into the power and limitations of these networks. Doing so for transformers remains an active area of research. Bhattamishra and others have shown that transformer encoders are at least as expressive as a certain kind of counter machine, while Merrill and Sabharwal have shown that fixed-precision transformer encoders recognize only languages in uniform TC^0. We connect and strengthen these results by identifying a variant of first-order logic with counting quantifiers that is simultaneously an upper bound for fixed-precision transformer encoders and a lower bound for transformer encoders. This brings us much closer than before to an exact characterization of the languages that transformer encoders recognize.

Triggered by limitations of graph-based deep learning methods in terms of computational expressivity and model flexibility, recent years have seen a surge of interest in computational models that operate on higher-order topological domains such as hypergraphs and simplicial complexes. While the increased expressivity of these models can indeed lead to a better classification performance and a more faithful representation of the underlying system, the computational cost of these higher-order models can increase dramatically. To this end, we here explore a simplicial complex neural network learning architecture based on random walks and fast 1D convolutions (SCRaWl), in which we can adjust the increase in computational cost by varying the length and number of random walks considered while accounting for higher-order relationships. Importantly, due to the random walk-based design, the expressivity of the proposed architecture is provably incomparable to that of existing message-passing simplicial neural networks. We empirically evaluate SCRaWl on real-world datasets and show that it outperforms other simplicial neural networks.

Creating fast and accurate force fields is a long-standing challenge in computational chemistry and materials science. Recently, several equivariant message passing neural networks (MPNNs) have been shown to outperform models built using other approaches in terms of accuracy. However, most MPNNs suffer from high computational cost and poor scalability. We propose that these limitations arise because MPNNs only pass two-body messages leading to a direct relationship between the number of layers and the expressivity of the network. In this work, we introduce MACE, a new equivariant MPNN model that uses higher body order messages. In particular, we show that using four-body messages reduces the required number of message passing iterations to just two, resulting in a fast and highly parallelizable model, reaching or exceeding state-of-the-art accuracy on the rMD17, 3BPA, and AcAc benchmark tasks. We also demonstrate that using higher order messages leads to an improved steepness of the learning curves.

Quantum many-body physics simulation has important impacts on understanding fundamental science and has applications to quantum materials design and quantum technology. However, due to the exponentially growing size of the Hilbert space with respect to the particle number, a direct simulation is intractable. While representing quantum states with tensor networks and neural networks are the two state-of-the-art methods for approximate simulations, each has its own limitations in terms of expressivity and inductive bias. To address these challenges, we develop a novel architecture, Autoregressive Neural TensorNet (ANTN), which bridges tensor networks and autoregressive neural networks. We show that Autoregressive Neural TensorNet parameterizes normalized wavefunctions, allows for exact sampling, generalizes the expressivity of tensor networks and autoregressive neural networks, and inherits a variety of symmetries from autoregressive neural networks. We demonstrate our approach on quantum state learning as well as finding the ground state of the challenging 2D J_1-J_2 Heisenberg model with different systems sizes and coupling parameters, outperforming both tensor networks and autoregressive neural networks. Our work opens up new opportunities for scientific simulations of quantum many-body physics and quantum technology.

This paper presents Att-HACK, the first large database of acted speech with social attitudes. Available databases of expressive speech are rare and very often restricted to the primary emotions: anger, joy, sadness, fear. This greatly limits the scope of the research on expressive speech. Besides, a fundamental aspect of speech prosody is always ignored and missing from such databases: its variety, i.e. the possibility to repeat an utterance while varying its prosody. This paper represents a first attempt to widen the scope of expressivity in speech, by providing a database of acted speech with social attitudes: friendly, seductive, dominant, and distant. The proposed database comprises 25 speakers interpreting 100 utterances in 4 social attitudes, with 3-5 repetitions each per attitude for a total of around 30 hours of speech. The Att-HACK is freely available for academic research under a Creative Commons Licence.

We present an open-source benchmark and evaluation framework for assessing emotional boundary handling in Large Language Models (LLMs). Using a dataset of 1156 prompts across six languages, we evaluated three leading LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude-3.5 Sonnet, and Mistral-large) on their ability to maintain appropriate emotional boundaries through pattern-matched response analysis. Our framework quantifies responses across seven key patterns: direct refusal, apology, explanation, deflection, acknowledgment, boundary setting, and emotional awareness. Results demonstrate significant variation in boundary-handling approaches, with Claude-3.5 achieving the highest overall score (8.69/10) and producing longer, more nuanced responses (86.51 words on average). We identified a substantial performance gap between English (average score 25.62) and non-English interactions (< 0.22), with English responses showing markedly higher refusal rates (43.20% vs. < 1% for non-English). Pattern analysis revealed model-specific strategies, such as Mistral's preference for deflection (4.2%) and consistently low empathy scores across all models (< 0.06). Limitations include potential oversimplification through pattern matching, lack of contextual understanding in response analysis, and binary classification of complex emotional responses. Future work should explore more nuanced scoring methods, expand language coverage, and investigate cultural variations in emotional boundary expectations. Our benchmark and methodology provide a foundation for systematic evaluation of LLM emotional intelligence and boundary-setting capabilities.

In various fields of knowledge creation, including science, new ideas often build on pre-existing information. In this work, we explore this concept within the context of language models. Specifically, we explore the potential of self-training models on their own outputs, akin to how humans learn and build on their previous thoughts and actions. While this approach is intuitively appealing, our research reveals its practical limitations. We find that extended self-training of the GPT-2 model leads to a significant degradation in performance, resulting in repetitive and collapsed token output.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based applications are graduating from research prototypes to products serving millions of users, influencing how people write and consume information. A prominent example is the appearance of Answer Engines: LLM-based generative search engines supplanting traditional search engines. Answer engines not only retrieve relevant sources to a user query but synthesize answer summaries that cite the sources. To understand these systems' limitations, we first conducted a study with 21 participants, evaluating interactions with answer vs. traditional search engines and identifying 16 answer engine limitations. From these insights, we propose 16 answer engine design recommendations, linked to 8 metrics. An automated evaluation implementing our metrics on three popular engines (You.com, Perplexity.ai, BingChat) quantifies common limitations (e.g., frequent hallucination, inaccurate citation) and unique features (e.g., variation in answer confidence), with results mirroring user study insights. We release our Answer Engine Evaluation benchmark (AEE) to facilitate transparent evaluation of LLM-based applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) require careful safety alignment to prevent malicious outputs. While significant research focuses on mitigating harmful content generation, the enhanced safety often come with the side effect of over-refusal, where LLMs may reject innocuous prompts and become less helpful. Although the issue of over-refusal has been empirically observed, a systematic measurement is challenging due to the difficulty of crafting prompts that appear harmful but are benign. This study proposes a novel method for automatically generating large-scale sets of "seemingly toxic prompts" (benign prompts likely rejected by LLMs). Leveraging this technique, we introduce OR-Bench, the first large-scale over-refusal benchmark. OR-Bench comprises 80,000 seemingly toxic prompts across 10 common rejection categories, a subset of around 1,000 hard prompts that are challenging even for state-of-the-art LLMs, and an additional 600 toxic prompts to prevent indiscriminate responses. We then conduct a comprehensive study to measure the over-refusal of 25 popular LLMs across 8 model families. Our datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/bench-llm/or-bench and the demo can be found at https://huggingface.co/spaces/bench-llm/or-bench. We hope this benchmark can help the community develop better safety aligned models.

Applying existing methods to emotional support conversation -- which provides valuable assistance to people who are in need -- has two major limitations: (a) they generally employ a conversation-level emotion label, which is too coarse-grained to capture user's instant mental state; (b) most of them focus on expressing empathy in the response(s) rather than gradually reducing user's distress. To address the problems, we propose a novel model MISC, which firstly infers the user's fine-grained emotional status, and then responds skillfully using a mixture of strategy. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and reveal the benefits of fine-grained emotion understanding as well as mixed-up strategy modeling. Our code and data could be found in https://github.com/morecry/MISC.

The field of Sign Language Production (SLP) lacked a large-scale, pre-trained model based on deep learning for continuous American Sign Language (ASL) production in the past decade. This limitation hampers communication for all individuals with disabilities relying on ASL. To address this issue, we undertook the secondary development and utilization of How2Sign, one of the largest publicly available ASL datasets. Despite its significance, prior researchers in the field of sign language have not effectively employed this corpus due to the intricacies involved in American Sign Language Production (ASLP). To conduct large-scale ASLP, we propose SignDiff based on the latest work in related fields, which is a dual-condition diffusion pre-training model that can generate human sign language speakers from a skeleton pose. SignDiff has a novel Frame Reinforcement Network called FR-Net, similar to dense human pose estimation work, which enhances the correspondence between text lexical symbols and sign language dense pose frames reduce the occurrence of multiple fingers in the diffusion model. In addition, our ASLP method proposes two new improved modules and a new loss function to improve the accuracy and quality of sign language skeletal posture and enhance the ability of the model to train on large-scale data. We propose the first baseline for ASL production and report the scores of 17.19 and 12.85 on BLEU-4 on the How2Sign dev/test sets. We also evaluated our model on the previous mainstream dataset called PHOENIX14T, and the main experiments achieved the results of SOTA. In addition, our image quality far exceeds all previous results by 10 percentage points on the SSIM indicator. Finally, we conducted ablation studies and qualitative evaluations for discussion.

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years, new opportunities are emerging, but also new challenges, and contamination is quickly becoming critical. Business applications and fundraising in AI have reached a scale at which a few percentage points gained on popular question-answering benchmarks could translate into dozens of millions of dollars, placing high pressure on model integrity. At the same time, it is becoming harder and harder to keep track of the data that LLMs have seen; if not impossible with closed-source models like GPT-4 and Claude-3 not divulging any information on the training set. As a result, contamination becomes a critical issue: LLMs' performance may not be reliable anymore, as the high performance may be at least partly due to their previous exposure to the data. This limitation jeopardizes the entire progress in the field of NLP, yet, there remains a lack of methods on how to efficiently address contamination, or a clear consensus on prevention, mitigation and classification of contamination. In this paper, we survey all recent work on contamination with LLMs, and help the community track contamination levels of LLMs by releasing an open-source Python library named LLMSanitize implementing major contamination detection algorithms, which link is: https://github.com/ntunlp/LLMSanitize.

What are the root causes of hallucinations in large language models (LLMs)? We use Communication Complexity to prove that the Transformer layer is incapable of composing functions (e.g., identify a grandparent of a person in a genealogy) if the domains of the functions are large enough; we show through examples that this inability is already empirically present when the domains are quite small. We also point out that several mathematical tasks that are at the core of the so-called compositional tasks thought to be hard for LLMs are unlikely to be solvable by Transformers, for large enough instances and assuming that certain well accepted conjectures in the field of Computational Complexity are true.

Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been several documented occurrences of (1) absence of moderation and (2) censorship due to the reliance on keyword spotting out of context. Further, high-profile individuals have frequently been at the center of the moderation process, while large and targeted hate speech campaigns against minorities have been overlooked. These limitations are mainly due to the lack of high-quality data in the local languages and the failure to include local communities in the collection, annotation, and moderation processes. To address this issue, we present AfriHate: a multilingual collection of hate speech and abusive language datasets in 15 African languages. Each instance in AfriHate is annotated by native speakers familiar with the local culture. We report the challenges related to the construction of the datasets and present various classification baseline results with and without using LLMs. The datasets, individual annotations, and hate speech and offensive language lexicons are available on https://github.com/AfriHate/AfriHate

Large language models can produce creative and diverse responses. However, to integrate them into current developer workflows, it is essential to constrain their outputs to follow specific formats or standards. In this work, we surveyed 51 experienced industry professionals to understand the range of scenarios and motivations driving the need for output constraints from a user-centered perspective. We identified 134 concrete use cases for constraints at two levels: low-level, which ensures the output adhere to a structured format and an appropriate length, and high-level, which requires the output to follow semantic and stylistic guidelines without hallucination. Critically, applying output constraints could not only streamline the currently repetitive process of developing, testing, and integrating LLM prompts for developers, but also enhance the user experience of LLM-powered features and applications. We conclude with a discussion on user preferences and needs towards articulating intended constraints for LLMs, alongside an initial design for a constraint prototyping tool.

Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) with remarkable performance in various tasks and also extend their power to multimodal domains. Despite their success, large GPT models like GPT-4 face inherent limitations such as considerable size, high computational requirements, complex deployment processes, and closed development loops. These constraints restrict their widespread adoption and raise concerns regarding their responsible development and usage. The need for user-friendly, relatively small, and open-sourced alternative GPT models arises from the desire to overcome these limitations while retaining high performance. In this survey paper, we provide an examination of alternative open-sourced models of large GPTs, focusing on user-friendly and relatively small models that facilitate easier deployment and accessibility. Through this extensive survey, we aim to equip researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts with a thorough understanding of user-friendly and relatively small open-sourced models of large GPTs, their current state, challenges, and future research directions, inspiring the development of more efficient, accessible, and versatile GPT models that cater to the broader scientific community and advance the field of general artificial intelligence. The source contents are continuously updating in https://github.com/GPT-Alternatives/gpt_alternatives.

This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to provide accurate estimates of concreteness, valence and arousal for multi-word expressions. Unlike previous artificial intelligence (AI) methods, LLMs can capture the nuanced meanings of multi-word expressions. We systematically evaluated ChatGPT-4o's ability to predict concreteness, valence and arousal. In Study 1, ChatGPT-4o showed strong correlations with human concreteness ratings (r = .8) for multi-word expressions. In Study 2, these findings were repeated for valence and arousal ratings of individual words, matching or outperforming previous AI models. Study 3 extended the prevalence and arousal analysis to multi-word expressions and showed promising results despite the lack of large-scale human benchmarks. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs for generating valuable psycholinguistic data related to multiword expressions. To help researchers with stimulus selection, we provide datasets with AI norms of concreteness, valence and arousal for 126,397 English single words and 63,680 multi-word expressions

While recent generative models can produce engaging music, their utility is limited. The variation in the music is often left to chance, resulting in compositions that lack structure. Pieces extending beyond a minute can become incoherent or repetitive. This paper introduces an approach for generating structured, arbitrarily long musical pieces. Central to this approach is the creation of musical segments using a conditional generative model, with transitions between these segments. The generation of prompts that determine the high-level composition is distinct from the creation of finer, lower-level details. A large language model is then used to suggest the musical form.

The critique capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for reasoning abilities, which can provide necessary suggestions (e.g., detailed analysis and constructive feedback). Therefore, how to evaluate the critique capacity of LLMs has drawn great attention and several critique benchmarks have been proposed. However, existing critique benchmarks usually have the following limitations: (1). Focusing on diverse reasoning tasks in general domains and insufficient evaluation on code tasks (e.g., only covering code generation task), where the difficulty of queries is relatively easy (e.g., the code queries of CriticBench are from Humaneval and MBPP). (2). Lacking comprehensive evaluation from different dimensions. To address these limitations, we introduce a holistic code critique benchmark for LLMs called CodeCriticBench. Specifically, our CodeCriticBench includes two mainstream code tasks (i.e., code generation and code QA) with different difficulties. Besides, the evaluation protocols include basic critique evaluation and advanced critique evaluation for different characteristics, where fine-grained evaluation checklists are well-designed for advanced settings. Finally, we conduct extensive experimental results of existing LLMs, which show the effectiveness of CodeCriticBench.

How much is 56 times 37? Language models often make mistakes in these types of difficult calculations. This is usually explained by their inability to perform complex reasoning. Since language models rely on large training sets and great memorization capability, naturally they are not equipped to run complex calculations. However, one can argue that humans also cannot perform this calculation immediately and require a considerable amount of time to construct the solution. In order to enhance the generalization capability of language models, and as a parallel to human behavior, we propose to use special 'thinking tokens' which allow the model to perform much more calculations whenever a complex problem is encountered.

We evaluate a range of recent LLMs on English creative writing, a challenging and complex task that requires imagination, coherence, and style. We use a difficult, open-ended scenario chosen to avoid training data reuse: an epic narration of a single combat between Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), and a pterodactyl, a prehistoric flying reptile. We ask several LLMs and humans to write such a story and conduct a human evalution involving various criteria such as fluency, coherence, originality, humor, and style. Our results show that some state-of-the-art commercial LLMs match or slightly outperform our writers in most dimensions; whereas open-source LLMs lag behind. Humans retain an edge in creativity, while humor shows a binary divide between LLMs that can handle it comparably to humans and those that fail at it. We discuss the implications and limitations of our study and suggest directions for future research.

Recent work has shown that it is possible to resynthesize high-quality speech based, not on text, but on low bitrate discrete units that have been learned in a self-supervised fashion and can therefore capture expressive aspects of speech that are hard to transcribe (prosody, voice styles, non-verbal vocalization). The adoption of these methods is still limited by the fact that most speech synthesis datasets are read, severely limiting spontaneity and expressivity. Here, we introduce Expresso, a high-quality expressive speech dataset for textless speech synthesis that includes both read speech and improvised dialogues rendered in 26 spontaneous expressive styles. We illustrate the challenges and potentials of this dataset with an expressive resynthesis benchmark where the task is to encode the input in low-bitrate units and resynthesize it in a target voice while preserving content and style. We evaluate resynthesis quality with automatic metrics for different self-supervised discrete encoders, and explore tradeoffs between quality, bitrate and invariance to speaker and style. All the dataset, evaluation metrics and baseline models are open source

Authorship identification has proven unsettlingly effective in inferring the identity of the author of an unsigned document, even when sensitive personal information has been carefully omitted. In the digital era, individuals leave a lasting digital footprint through their written content, whether it is posted on social media, stored on their employer's computers, or located elsewhere. When individuals need to communicate publicly yet wish to remain anonymous, there is little available to protect them from unwanted authorship identification. This unprecedented threat to privacy is evident in scenarios such as whistle-blowing. Proposed defenses against authorship identification attacks primarily aim to obfuscate one's writing style, thereby making it unlinkable to their pre-existing writing, while concurrently preserving the original meaning and grammatical integrity. The presented work offers a comprehensive review of the advancements in this research area spanning over the past two decades and beyond. It emphasizes the methodological frameworks of modification and generation-based strategies devised to evade authorship identification attacks, highlighting joint efforts from the differential privacy community. Limitations of current research are discussed, with a spotlight on open challenges and potential research avenues.

In recent years, the community of 'explainable artificial intelligence' (XAI) has created a vast body of methods to bridge a perceived gap between model 'complexity' and 'interpretability'. However, a concrete problem to be solved by XAI methods has not yet been formally stated. As a result, XAI methods are lacking theoretical and empirical evidence for the 'correctness' of their explanations, limiting their potential use for quality-control and transparency purposes. At the same time, Haufe et al. (2014) showed, using simple toy examples, that even standard interpretations of linear models can be highly misleading. Specifically, high importance may be attributed to so-called suppressor variables lacking any statistical relation to the prediction target. This behavior has been confirmed empirically for a large array of XAI methods in Wilming et al. (2022). Here, we go one step further by deriving analytical expressions for the behavior of a variety of popular XAI methods on a simple two-dimensional binary classification problem involving Gaussian class-conditional distributions. We show that the majority of the studied approaches will attribute non-zero importance to a non-class-related suppressor feature in the presence of correlated noise. This poses important limitations on the interpretations and conclusions that the outputs of these XAI methods can afford.

Model distillation is a technique for transferring knowledge from large language models (LLMs) to smaller ones, aiming to create resource-efficient yet high-performing models. However, excessive distillation can lead to homogenization, reducing diversity among models and impairing their ability to robustly handle complex or novel tasks. These limitations underscore the need to systematically quantify the distillation process and its impact. In this work, we propose a framework to evaluate and quantify model distillation. Our method addresses two key aspects: (1) Identifying identity cognition contradictions to assess discrepancies in how models perceive and represent identity-related information, and (2) Analyzing multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. Experimental results demonstrate two key insights: (1) Well-known closed-source and open-source LLMs usually exhibit high distillation degrees, except for Claude, Doubao, and Gemini. (2) Base LLMs show higher distillation degrees compared to aligned LLMs. By offering a systematic approach to improve the transparency of LLM data distillation, we call for LLMs with more independent development and more transparent technical reports to improve LLMs' robustness and safety. The code and data are available under https://github.com/Aegis1863/LLMs-Distillation-Quantification.

The integration of Computer-Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) with Large Language Models (LLMs) holds great potential in clinical applications, specifically in the roles of virtual family doctors and clinic assistants. However, current works in this field are plagued by limitations, specifically a restricted scope of applicable image domains and the provision of unreliable medical advice. This restricts their overall processing capabilities. Furthermore, the mismatch in writing style between LLMs and radiologists undermines their practical usefulness. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ChatCAD+, which is designed to be universal and reliable. It is capable of handling medical images from diverse domains and leveraging up-to-date information from reputable medical websites to provide reliable medical advice. Additionally, it incorporates a template retrieval system that improves report generation performance via exemplar reports. This approach ensures greater consistency with the expertise of human professionals. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhaozh10/ChatCAD.

As Large Language Models become more ubiquitous across domains, it becomes important to examine their inherent limitations critically. This work argues that hallucinations in language models are not just occasional errors but an inevitable feature of these systems. We demonstrate that hallucinations stem from the fundamental mathematical and logical structure of LLMs. It is, therefore, impossible to eliminate them through architectural improvements, dataset enhancements, or fact-checking mechanisms. Our analysis draws on computational theory and Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem, which references the undecidability of problems like the Halting, Emptiness, and Acceptance Problems. We demonstrate that every stage of the LLM process-from training data compilation to fact retrieval, intent classification, and text generation-will have a non-zero probability of producing hallucinations. This work introduces the concept of Structural Hallucination as an intrinsic nature of these systems. By establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations, we challenge the prevailing notion that they can be fully mitigated.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability for text generation. However, achieving optimal results with a given prompt or instruction can be challenging, especially for billion-sized models. Additionally, undesired behaviors such as toxicity or hallucinations can manifest. While much larger models (e.g., ChatGPT) may demonstrate strength in mitigating these issues, there is still no guarantee of complete prevention. In this work, we propose formalizing text generation as a future-constrained generation problem to minimize undesirable behaviors and enforce faithfulness to instructions. The estimation of future constraint satisfaction, accomplished using LLMs, guides the text generation process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach across three distinct text generation tasks: keyword-constrained generation (Lin et al., 2020), toxicity reduction (Gehman et al., 2020), and factual correctness in question-answering (Gao et al., 2023).

Shannon, in his seminal paper introducing information theory, divided the communication into three levels: technical, semantic, and effectivenss. While the technical level is concerned with accurate reconstruction of transmitted symbols, the semantic and effectiveness levels deal with the inferred meaning and its effect on the receiver. Thanks to telecommunications, the first level problem has produced great advances like the internet. Large Language Models (LLMs) make some progress towards the second goal, but the third level still remains largely untouched. The third problem deals with predicting and optimizing communication for desired receiver behavior. LLMs, while showing wide generalization capabilities across a wide range of tasks, are unable to solve for this. One reason for the underperformance could be a lack of "behavior tokens" in LLMs' training corpora. Behavior tokens define receiver behavior over a communication, such as shares, likes, clicks, purchases, retweets, etc. While preprocessing data for LLM training, behavior tokens are often removed from the corpora as noise. Therefore, in this paper, we make some initial progress towards reintroducing behavior tokens in LLM training. The trained models, other than showing similar performance to LLMs on content understanding tasks, show generalization capabilities on behavior simulation, content simulation, behavior understanding, and behavior domain adaptation. Using a wide range of tasks on two corpora, we show results on all these capabilities. We call these models Large Content and Behavior Models (LCBMs). Further, to spur more research on LCBMs, we release our new Content Behavior Corpus (CBC), a repository containing communicator, message, and corresponding receiver behavior.

The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have led to their use as substitutes for human feedback for training and assessing other LLMs. These methods often rely on `constitutions', written guidelines which a critic model uses to provide feedback and improve generations. We investigate how the choice of constitution affects feedback quality by using four different constitutions to improve patient-centered communication in medical interviews. In pairwise comparisons conducted by 215 human raters, we found that detailed constitutions led to better results regarding emotive qualities. However, none of the constitutions outperformed the baseline in learning more practically-oriented skills related to information gathering and provision. Our findings indicate that while detailed constitutions should be prioritised, there are possible limitations to the effectiveness of AI feedback as a reward signal in certain areas.

With their increasing size, large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly good at language understanding tasks. But even with high performance on specific downstream task, LLMs fail at simple linguistic tests for negation or quantifier understanding. Previous work on quantifier understanding in LLMs show inverse scaling in understanding few-type quantifiers. In this paper, we question the claims of of previous work and show that it is a result of inappropriate testing methodology. We also present alternate methods to measure quantifier comprehension in LLMs and show that LLMs are able to better understand the difference between the meaning of few-type and most-type quantifiers as their size increases, although they are not particularly good at it. We also observe inverse scaling for most-type quantifier understanding, which is contrary to human psycho-linguistic experiments and previous work, where the model's understanding of most-type quantifier gets worse as the model size increases. We do this evaluation on models ranging from 125M-175B parameters, which suggests that LLMs do not do as well as expected with quantifiers. We also discuss the possible reasons for this and the relevance of quantifier understanding in evaluating language understanding in LLMs.

The field of Text-to-Speech has experienced huge improvements last years benefiting from deep learning techniques. Producing realistic speech becomes possible now. As a consequence, the research on the control of the expressiveness, allowing to generate speech in different styles or manners, has attracted increasing attention lately. Systems able to control style have been developed and show impressive results. However the control parameters often consist of latent variables and remain complex to interpret. In this paper, we analyze and compare different latent spaces and obtain an interpretation of their influence on expressive speech. This will enable the possibility to build controllable speech synthesis systems with an understandable behaviour.

For the purpose of efficient and cost-effective large-scale data labeling, crowdsourcing is increasingly being utilized. To guarantee the quality of data labeling, multiple annotations need to be collected for each data sample, and truth inference algorithms have been developed to accurately infer the true labels. Despite previous studies having released public datasets to evaluate the efficacy of truth inference algorithms, these have typically focused on a single type of crowdsourcing task and neglected the temporal information associated with workers' annotation activities. These limitations significantly restrict the practical applicability of these algorithms, particularly in the context of long-term and online truth inference. In this paper, we introduce a substantial crowdsourcing annotation dataset collected from a real-world crowdsourcing platform. This dataset comprises approximately two thousand workers, one million tasks, and six million annotations. The data was gathered over a period of approximately six months from various types of tasks, and the timestamps of each annotation were preserved. We analyze the characteristics of the dataset from multiple perspectives and evaluate the effectiveness of several representative truth inference algorithms on this dataset. We anticipate that this dataset will stimulate future research on tracking workers' abilities over time in relation to different types of tasks, as well as enhancing online truth inference.

As large language models (LLMs) gain popularity among speakers of diverse languages, we believe that it is crucial to benchmark them to better understand model behaviors, failures, and limitations in languages beyond English. In this work, we evaluate LLM APIs (ChatGPT, GPT-3, and GPT-4) on the Japanese national medical licensing examinations from the past five years, including the current year. Our team comprises native Japanese-speaking NLP researchers and a practicing cardiologist based in Japan. Our experiments show that GPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT and GPT-3 and passes all six years of the exams, highlighting LLMs' potential in a language that is typologically distant from English. However, our evaluation also exposes critical limitations of the current LLM APIs. First, LLMs sometimes select prohibited choices that should be strictly avoided in medical practice in Japan, such as suggesting euthanasia. Further, our analysis shows that the API costs are generally higher and the maximum context size is smaller for Japanese because of the way non-Latin scripts are currently tokenized in the pipeline. We release our benchmark as Igaku QA as well as all model outputs and exam metadata. We hope that our results and benchmark will spur progress on more diverse applications of LLMs. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/jungokasai/IgakuQA.

Emojis have become a universal language in online communication, often carrying nuanced and context-dependent meanings. Among these, irony poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to its inherent incongruity between appearance and intent. This study examines the ability of GPT-4o to interpret irony in emojis. By prompting GPT-4o to evaluate the likelihood of specific emojis being used to express irony on social media and comparing its interpretations with human perceptions, we aim to bridge the gap between machine and human understanding. Our findings reveal nuanced insights into GPT-4o's interpretive capabilities, highlighting areas of alignment with and divergence from human behavior. Additionally, this research underscores the importance of demographic factors, such as age and gender, in shaping emoji interpretation and evaluates how these factors influence GPT-4o's performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have displayed massive improvements in reasoning and decision-making skills and can hold natural conversations with users. Recently, many tool-use benchmark datasets have been proposed. However, existing datasets have the following limitations: (1). Insufficient evaluation scenarios (e.g., only cover limited tool-use scenes). (2). Extensive evaluation costs (e.g., GPT API costs). To address these limitations, in this work, we propose a multi-granularity tool-use benchmark for large language models called MTU-Bench. For the "multi-granularity" property, our MTU-Bench covers five tool usage scenes (i.e., single-turn and single-tool, single-turn and multiple-tool, multiple-turn and single-tool, multiple-turn and multiple-tool, and out-of-distribution tasks). Besides, all evaluation metrics of our MTU-Bench are based on the prediction results and the ground truth without using any GPT or human evaluation metrics. Moreover, our MTU-Bench is collected by transforming existing high-quality datasets to simulate real-world tool usage scenarios, and we also propose an instruction dataset called MTU-Instruct data to enhance the tool-use abilities of existing LLMs. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our MTU-Bench. Code and data will be released at https: //github.com/MTU-Bench-Team/MTU-Bench.git.

Recent large language models (LLMs) can generate and revise text with human-level performance, and have been widely commercialized in systems like ChatGPT. These models come with clear limitations: they can produce inaccurate information, reinforce existing biases, and be easily misused. Yet, many scientists have been using them to assist their scholarly writing. How wide-spread is LLM usage in the academic literature currently? To answer this question, we use an unbiased, large-scale approach, free from any assumptions on academic LLM usage. We study vocabulary changes in 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010-2024, and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. Our analysis based on excess words usage suggests that at least 10% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, and was as high as 30% for some PubMed sub-corpora. We show that the appearance of LLM-based writing assistants has had an unprecedented impact in the scientific literature, surpassing the effect of major world events such as the Covid pandemic.

The objective of this paper is to predict (A) whether a sentence in a written text expresses an emotion, (B) the mode(s) in which it is expressed, (C) whether it is basic or complex, and (D) its emotional category. One of our major contributions, through a dataset and a model, is to integrate the fact that an emotion can be expressed in different modes: from a direct mode, essentially lexicalized, to a more indirect mode, where emotions will only be suggested, a mode that NLP approaches generally don't take into account. Another originality is that the scope is on written texts, as opposed usual work focusing on conversational (often multi-modal) data. In this context, modes of expression are seen as a factor towards the automatic analysis of complexity in texts. Experiments on French texts show acceptable results compared to the human annotators' agreement, and outperforming results compared to using a large language model with in-context learning (i.e. no fine-tuning).

Large language models (LLMs) trained on web-scale datasets raise substantial concerns regarding permissible data usage. One major question is whether these models "memorize" all their training data or they integrate many data sources in some way more akin to how a human would learn and synthesize information. The answer hinges, to a large degree, on how we define memorization. In this work, we propose the Adversarial Compression Ratio (ACR) as a metric for assessing memorization in LLMs -- a given string from the training data is considered memorized if it can be elicited by a prompt shorter than the string itself. In other words, these strings can be "compressed" with the model by computing adversarial prompts of fewer tokens. We outline the limitations of existing notions of memorization and show how the ACR overcomes these challenges by (i) offering an adversarial view to measuring memorization, especially for monitoring unlearning and compliance; and (ii) allowing for the flexibility to measure memorization for arbitrary strings at a reasonably low compute. Our definition serves as a valuable and practical tool for determining when model owners may be violating terms around data usage, providing a potential legal tool and a critical lens through which to address such scenarios. Project page: https://locuslab.github.io/acr-memorization.

The strive to make AI applications "safe" has led to the development of safety-measures as the main or even sole normative requirement of their permissible use. Similar can be attested to the latest version of chatbots, such as chatGPT. In this view, if they are "safe", they are supposed to be permissible to deploy. This approach, which we call "safety-normativity", is rather limited in solving the emerging issues that chatGPT and other chatbots have caused thus far. In answering this limitation, in this paper we argue for limiting chatbots in the range of topics they can chat about according to the normative concept of appropriateness. We argue that rather than looking for "safety" in a chatbot's utterances to determine what they may and may not say, we ought to assess those utterances according to three forms of appropriateness: technical-discursive, social, and moral. We then spell out what requirements for chatbots follow from these forms of appropriateness to avoid the limits of previous accounts: positionality, acceptability, and value alignment (PAVA). With these in mind, we may be able to determine what a chatbot may and may not say. Lastly, one initial suggestion is to use challenge sets, specifically designed for appropriateness, as a validation method.

One of the limitations of large language models is that they do not have access to up-to-date, proprietary or personal data. As a result, there are multiple efforts to extend language models with techniques for accessing external data. In that sense, LLMs share the vision of data integration systems whose goal is to provide seamless access to a large collection of heterogeneous data sources. While the details and the techniques of LLMs differ greatly from those of data integration, this paper shows that some of the lessons learned from research on data integration can elucidate the research path we are conducting today on language models.

We are exposed to much information trying to influence us, such as teaser messages, debates, politically framed news, and propaganda - all of which use persuasive language. With the recent interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), we study the ability of LLMs to produce persuasive text. As opposed to prior work which focuses on particular domains or types of persuasion, we conduct a general study across various domains to measure and benchmark to what degree LLMs produce persuasive text - both when explicitly instructed to rewrite text to be more or less persuasive and when only instructed to paraphrase. To this end, we construct a new dataset, Persuasive-Pairs, of pairs each consisting of a short text and of a text rewritten by an LLM to amplify or diminish persuasive language. We multi-annotate the pairs on a relative scale for persuasive language. This data is not only a valuable resource in itself, but we also show that it can be used to train a regression model to predict a score of persuasive language between text pairs. This model can score and benchmark new LLMs across domains, thereby facilitating the comparison of different LLMs. Finally, we discuss effects observed for different system prompts. Notably, we find that different 'personas' in the system prompt of LLaMA3 change the persuasive language in the text substantially, even when only instructed to paraphrase. These findings underscore the importance of investigating persuasive language in LLM generated text.

The field of large language models (LLMs) has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by the desire for better efficiency, interpretability, and safe use. Building on the novel approach of "activation engineering," this study explores personality modification in LLMs, drawing inspiration from research like Refusal in LLMs Is Mediated by a Single Direction (arXiv:2406.11717) and Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition (arXiv:2312.06681). We leverage activation engineering to develop a method for identifying and adjusting activation directions related to personality traits, which may allow for dynamic LLM personality fine-tuning. This work aims to further our understanding of LLM interpretability while examining the ethical implications of such developments.

We release Rasa, the first multilingual expressive TTS dataset for any Indian language, which contains 10 hours of neutral speech and 1-3 hours of expressive speech for each of the 6 Ekman emotions covering 3 languages: Assamese, Bengali, & Tamil. Our ablation studies reveal that just 1 hour of neutral and 30 minutes of expressive data can yield a Fair system as indicated by MUSHRA scores. Increasing neutral data to 10 hours, with minimal expressive data, significantly enhances expressiveness. This offers a practical recipe for resource-constrained languages, prioritizing easily obtainable neutral data alongside smaller amounts of expressive data. We show the importance of syllabically balanced data and pooling emotions to enhance expressiveness. We also highlight challenges in generating specific emotions, e.g., fear and surprise.

Training large neural language models on large datasets is resource- and time-intensive. These requirements create a barrier to entry, where those with fewer resources cannot build competitive models. This paper presents various techniques for making it possible to (a) train a large language model using resources that a modest research lab might have, and (b) train it in a reasonable amount of time. We provide concrete recommendations for practitioners, which we illustrate with a case study: a T5 model for Danish, the first for this language.

Neural networks are capable of translating between languages -- in some cases even between two languages where there is little or no access to parallel translations, in what is known as Unsupervised Machine Translation (UMT). Given this progress, it is intriguing to ask whether machine learning tools can ultimately enable understanding animal communication, particularly that of highly intelligent animals. We propose a theoretical framework for analyzing UMT when no parallel translations are available and when it cannot be assumed that the source and target corpora address related subject domains or posses similar linguistic structure. We exemplify this theory with two stylized models of language, for which our framework provides bounds on necessary sample complexity; the bounds are formally proven and experimentally verified on synthetic data. These bounds show that the error rates are inversely related to the language complexity and amount of common ground. This suggests that unsupervised translation of animal communication may be feasible if the communication system is sufficiently complex.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated significant proficiency in solving a wide range of general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Researchers have observed a direct correlation between the performance of these models and their sizes. As a result, the sizes of these models have notably expanded in recent years, persuading researchers to adopt the term large language models (LLMs) to characterize the larger-sized PLMs. The size expansion comes with a distinct capability called in-context learning (ICL), which represents a special form of prompting and allows the models to be utilized through the presentation of demonstration examples without modifications to the model parameters. Although interesting, privacy concerns have become a major obstacle in its widespread usage. Multiple studies have examined the privacy risks linked to ICL and prompting in general, and have devised techniques to alleviate these risks. Thus, there is a necessity to organize these mitigation techniques for the benefit of the community. This survey provides a systematic overview of the privacy protection methods employed during ICL and prompting in general. We review, analyze, and compare different methods under this paradigm. Furthermore, we provide a summary of the resources accessible for the development of these frameworks. Finally, we discuss the limitations of these frameworks and offer a detailed examination of the promising areas that necessitate further exploration.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are gaining increasing popularity in both academia and industry due to their remarkable performance in various applications such as visual question answering, visual perception, understanding, and reasoning. Over the past few years, significant efforts have been made to examine MLLMs from multiple perspectives. This paper presents a comprehensive review of 180 benchmarks and evaluation for MLLMs, focusing on (1)perception and understanding, (2)cognition and reasoning, (3)specific domains, (4)key capabilities, and (5)other modalities. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the current evaluation methods for MLLMs and explore promising future directions. Our key argument is that evaluation should be regarded as a crucial discipline to better support the development of MLLMs. For more details, please visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/swordlidev/Evaluation-Multimodal-LLMs-Survey.

It is common to reject undesired outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs); however, current methods to do so require an excessive amount of computation, or severely distort the distribution of outputs. We present a method to balance the distortion of the output distribution with computational efficiency, allowing for the generation of long sequences of text with difficult-to-satisfy constraints, with less amplification of low probability outputs compared to existing methods. We show through a series of experiments that the task-specific performance of our method is comparable to methods that do not distort the output distribution, while being much more computationally efficient.

We introduce GEM, a living benchmark for natural language Generation (NLG), its Evaluation, and Metrics. Measuring progress in NLG relies on a constantly evolving ecosystem of automated metrics, datasets, and human evaluation standards. Due to this moving target, new models often still evaluate on divergent anglo-centric corpora with well-established, but flawed, metrics. This disconnect makes it challenging to identify the limitations of current models and opportunities for progress. Addressing this limitation, GEM provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested. Regular updates to the benchmark will help NLG research become more multilingual and evolve the challenge alongside models. This paper serves as the description of the data for which we are organizing a shared task at our ACL 2021 Workshop and to which we invite the entire NLG community to participate.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, but their progress has yet to be equal across languages. While most LLMs are trained in high-resource languages like English, multilingual models generally underperform monolingual ones. Additionally, aspects of their multilingual foundation sometimes restrict the byproducts they produce, like computational demands and licensing regimes. In this study, we document the development of open-foundation models tailored for use in low-resource settings, their limitations, and their benefits. This is the TeenyTinyLlama pair: two compact models for Brazilian Portuguese text generation. We release them under the permissive Apache 2.0 license on GitHub and Hugging Face for community use and further development. See https://github.com/Nkluge-correa/TeenyTinyLlama

General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built on massive swathes of public web data, assembled into corpora such as C4, RefinedWeb, and Dolma. To our knowledge, we conduct the first, large-scale, longitudinal audit of the consent protocols for the web domains underlying AI training corpora. Our audit of 14,000 web domains provides an expansive view of crawlable web data and how consent preferences to use it are changing over time. We observe a proliferation of AI-specific clauses to limit use, acute differences in restrictions on AI developers, as well as general inconsistencies between websites' expressed intentions in their Terms of Service and their robots.txt. We diagnose these as symptoms of ineffective web protocols, not designed to cope with the widespread re-purposing of the internet for AI. Our longitudinal analyses show that in a single year (2023-2024) there has been a rapid crescendo of data restrictions from web sources, rendering ~5%+ of all tokens in C4, or 28%+ of the most actively maintained, critical sources in C4, fully restricted from use. For Terms of Service crawling restrictions, a full 45% of C4 is now restricted. If respected or enforced, these restrictions are rapidly biasing the diversity, freshness, and scaling laws for general-purpose AI systems. We hope to illustrate the emerging crisis in data consent, foreclosing much of the open web, not only for commercial AI, but non-commercial AI and academic purposes.

Widely deployed large language models (LLMs) can produce convincing yet incorrect outputs, potentially misleading users who may rely on them as if they were correct. To reduce such overreliance, there have been calls for LLMs to communicate their uncertainty to end users. However, there has been little empirical work examining how users perceive and act upon LLMs' expressions of uncertainty. We explore this question through a large-scale, pre-registered, human-subject experiment (N=404) in which participants answer medical questions with or without access to responses from a fictional LLM-infused search engine. Using both behavioral and self-reported measures, we examine how different natural language expressions of uncertainty impact participants' reliance, trust, and overall task performance. We find that first-person expressions (e.g., "I'm not sure, but...") decrease participants' confidence in the system and tendency to agree with the system's answers, while increasing participants' accuracy. An exploratory analysis suggests that this increase can be attributed to reduced (but not fully eliminated) overreliance on incorrect answers. While we observe similar effects for uncertainty expressed from a general perspective (e.g., "It's not clear, but..."), these effects are weaker and not statistically significant. Our findings suggest that using natural language expressions of uncertainty may be an effective approach for reducing overreliance on LLMs, but that the precise language used matters. This highlights the importance of user testing before deploying LLMs at scale.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being utilized by both candidates and employers in the recruitment context. However, with this comes numerous ethical concerns, particularly related to the lack of transparency in these "black-box" models. Although previous studies have sought to increase the transparency of these models by investigating the personality traits of LLMs, many of the previous studies have provided them with personality assessments to complete. On the other hand, this study seeks to obtain a better understanding of such models by examining their output variations based on different input prompts. Specifically, we use a novel elicitation approach using prompts derived from common interview questions, as well as prompts designed to elicit particular Big Five personality traits to examine whether the models were susceptible to trait-activation like humans are, to measure their personality based on the language used in their outputs. To do so, we repeatedly prompted multiple LMs with different parameter sizes, including Llama-2, Falcon, Mistral, Bloom, GPT, OPT, and XLNet (base and fine tuned versions) and examined their personality using classifiers trained on the myPersonality dataset. Our results reveal that, generally, all LLMs demonstrate high openness and low extraversion. However, whereas LMs with fewer parameters exhibit similar behaviour in personality traits, newer and LMs with more parameters exhibit a broader range of personality traits, with increased agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness. Furthermore, a greater number of parameters is positively associated with openness and conscientiousness. Moreover, fine-tuned models exhibit minor modulations in their personality traits, contingent on the dataset. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Many cognitive approaches to well-being, such as recognizing and reframing unhelpful thoughts, have received considerable empirical support over the past decades, yet still lack truly widespread adoption in self-help format. A barrier to that adoption is a lack of adequately specific and diverse dedicated practice material. This work examines whether current language models can be leveraged to both produce a virtually unlimited quantity of practice material illustrating standard unhelpful thought patterns matching specific given contexts, and generate suitable positive reframing proposals. We propose PATTERNREFRAME, a novel dataset of about 10k examples of thoughts containing unhelpful thought patterns conditioned on a given persona, accompanied by about 27k positive reframes. By using this dataset to train and/or evaluate current models, we show that existing models can already be powerful tools to help generate an abundance of tailored practice material and hypotheses, with no or minimal additional model training required.

This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the recent advancements and challenges in applying large language models to the field of audio signal processing. Audio processing, with its diverse signal representations and a wide range of sources--from human voices to musical instruments and environmental sounds--poses challenges distinct from those found in traditional Natural Language Processing scenarios. Nevertheless, Large Audio Models, epitomized by transformer-based architectures, have shown marked efficacy in this sphere. By leveraging massive amount of data, these models have demonstrated prowess in a variety of audio tasks, spanning from Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech to Music Generation, among others. Notably, recently these Foundational Audio Models, like SeamlessM4T, have started showing abilities to act as universal translators, supporting multiple speech tasks for up to 100 languages without any reliance on separate task-specific systems. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art methodologies regarding Foundational Large Audio Models, their performance benchmarks, and their applicability to real-world scenarios. We also highlight current limitations and provide insights into potential future research directions in the realm of Large Audio Models with the intent to spark further discussion, thereby fostering innovation in the next generation of audio-processing systems. Furthermore, to cope with the rapid development in this area, we will consistently update the relevant repository with relevant recent articles and their open-source implementations at https://github.com/EmulationAI/awesome-large-audio-models.

In the last five years, there has been a significant focus in Natural Language Processing (NLP) on developing larger Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and introducing benchmarks such as SuperGLUE and SQuAD to measure their abilities in language understanding, reasoning, and reading comprehension. These PLMs have achieved impressive results on these benchmarks, even surpassing human performance in some cases. This has led to claims of superhuman capabilities and the provocative idea that certain tasks have been solved. In this position paper, we take a critical look at these claims and ask whether PLMs truly have superhuman abilities and what the current benchmarks are really evaluating. We show that these benchmarks have serious limitations affecting the comparison between humans and PLMs and provide recommendations for fairer and more transparent benchmarks.

As large language models increase in capability, researchers have started to conduct surveys of all kinds on these models with varying scientific motivations. In this work, we examine what we can learn from a model's survey responses on the basis of the well-established American Community Survey (ACS) by the U.S. Census Bureau. Evaluating more than a dozen different models, varying in size from a few hundred million to ten billion parameters, hundreds of thousands of times each on questions from the ACS, we systematically establish two dominant patterns. First, smaller models have a significant position and labeling bias, for example, towards survey responses labeled with the letter "A". This A-bias diminishes, albeit slowly, as model size increases. Second, when adjusting for this labeling bias through randomized answer ordering, models still do not trend toward US population statistics or those of any cognizable population. Rather, models across the board trend toward uniformly random aggregate statistics over survey responses. This pattern is robust to various different ways of prompting the model, including what is the de-facto standard. Our findings demonstrate that aggregate statistics of a language model's survey responses lack the signals found in human populations. This absence of statistical signal cautions about the use of survey responses from large language models at present time.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are nondeterministic, the same input can generate different outputs, some of which may be incorrect or hallucinated. If run again, the LLM may correct itself and produce the correct answer. Unfortunately, most LLM-powered systems resort to single results which, correct or not, users accept. Having the LLM produce multiple outputs may help identify disagreements or alternatives. However, it is not obvious how the user will interpret conflicts or inconsistencies. To this end, we investigate how users perceive the AI model and comprehend the generated information when they receive multiple, potentially inconsistent, outputs. Through a preliminary study, we identified five types of output inconsistencies. Based on these categories, we conducted a study (N=252) in which participants were given one or more LLM-generated passages to an information-seeking question. We found that inconsistency within multiple LLM-generated outputs lowered the participants' perceived AI capacity, while also increasing their comprehension of the given information. Specifically, we observed that this positive effect of inconsistencies was most significant for participants who read two passages, compared to those who read three. Based on these findings, we present design implications that, instead of regarding LLM output inconsistencies as a drawback, we can reveal the potential inconsistencies to transparently indicate the limitations of these models and promote critical LLM usage.

Steering vectors are a promising approach to control the behaviour of large language models. However, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) may offer a potential method to interpret steering vectors, recent findings show that SAE-reconstructed vectors often lack the steering properties of the original vectors. This paper investigates why directly applying SAEs to steering vectors yields misleading decompositions, identifying two reasons: (1) steering vectors fall outside the input distribution for which SAEs are designed, and (2) steering vectors can have meaningful negative projections in feature directions, which SAEs are not designed to accommodate. These limitations hinder the direct use of SAEs for interpreting steering vectors.

We advocate for a strong integration of Computational Creativity (CC) with research in large language and vision models (LLVMs) to address a key limitation of these models, i.e., creative problem solving. We present preliminary experiments showing how CC principles can be applied to address this limitation. Our goal is to foster discussions on creative problem solving in LLVMs and CC at prestigious ML venues. Our code is available at: https://github.com/lnairGT/creative-problem-solving-LLMs

In their recent Nature Human Behaviour paper, "Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models," (Webb, Holyoak, and Lu, 2023) the authors argue that "large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems." In this response, we provide counterexamples of the letter string analogies. In our tests, GPT-3 fails to solve even the easiest variants of the problems presented in the original paper. Zero-shot reasoning is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. We do not see that evidence in our experiments. To strengthen claims of humanlike reasoning such as zero-shot reasoning, it is important that the field develop approaches that rule out data memorization.

This work explores the impact of moderation on users' enjoyment of conversational AI systems. While recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to highly capable conversational AIs that are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, there is a growing concern over AI safety and the need to moderate systems to encourage safe language and prevent harm. However, some users argue that current approaches to moderation limit the technology, compromise free expression, and limit the value delivered by the technology. This study takes an unbiased stance and shows that moderation does not necessarily detract from user enjoyment. Heavy handed moderation does seem to have a nefarious effect, but models that are moderated to be safer can lead to a better user experience. By deploying various conversational AIs in the Chai platform, the study finds that user retention can increase with a level of moderation and safe system design. These results demonstrate the importance of appropriately defining safety in models in a way that is both responsible and focused on serving users.

The development and popularization of large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns that they will be used to create tailor-made, convincing arguments to push false or misleading narratives online. Early work has found that language models can generate content perceived as at least on par and often more persuasive than human-written messages. However, there is still limited knowledge about LLMs' persuasive capabilities in direct conversations with human counterparts and how personalization can improve their performance. In this pre-registered study, we analyze the effect of AI-driven persuasion in a controlled, harmless setting. We create a web-based platform where participants engage in short, multiple-round debates with a live opponent. Each participant is randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions, corresponding to a two-by-two factorial design: (1) Games are either played between two humans or between a human and an LLM; (2) Personalization might or might not be enabled, granting one of the two players access to basic sociodemographic information about their opponent. We found that participants who debated GPT-4 with access to their personal information had 81.7% (p < 0.01; N=820 unique participants) higher odds of increased agreement with their opponents compared to participants who debated humans. Without personalization, GPT-4 still outperforms humans, but the effect is lower and statistically non-significant (p=0.31). Overall, our results suggest that concerns around personalization are meaningful and have important implications for the governance of social media and the design of new online environments.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various tasks but often fail to handle queries that exceed their knowledge and capabilities, leading to incorrect or fabricated responses. This paper addresses the need for LLMs to recognize and refuse infeasible tasks due to the required skills surpassing their capabilities. We first systematically conceptualize infeasible tasks for LLMs, providing formal definitions and categorizations that cover a spectrum of related hallucinations. We develop and benchmark a new dataset comprising diverse infeasible and feasible tasks to test multiple LLMs' abilities on task feasibility. Furthermore, we explore the potential of training enhancements to increase LLMs' refusal capabilities with fine-tuning. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our methods, offering promising directions for refining the operational boundaries of LLMs in real applications.

We investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to distill text: to remove the textual traces of an undesired forbidden variable. We employ a range of LLMs with varying architectures and training approaches to distill text by identifying and removing information about the target variable while preserving other relevant signals. Our findings shed light on the strengths and limitations of LLMs in addressing the distillation and provide insights into the strategies for leveraging these models in computational social science investigations involving text data. In particular, we show that in the strong test of removing sentiment, the statistical association between the processed text and sentiment is still clearly detectable to machine learning classifiers post-LLM-distillation. Furthermore, we find that human annotators also struggle to distill sentiment while preserving other semantic content. This suggests there may be limited separability between concept variables in some text contexts, highlighting limitations of methods relying on text-level transformations and also raising questions about the robustness of distillation methods that achieve statistical independence in representation space if this is difficult for human coders operating on raw text to attain.

It is known that human speech and certain animal vocalizations can convey meaningful content because we can decipher the content that a given utterance does convey. This paper explores an alternative approach to determining whether a signal is meaningful, one that analyzes only the signal itself and is independent of what the conveyed meaning might be. We devise a method that takes a waveform as input and outputs a score indicating its degree of `meaningfulness`. We cluster contiguous portions of the input to minimize the total description length, and then take the length of the code of the assigned cluster labels as meaningfulness score. We evaluate our method empirically, against several baselines, and show that it is the only one to give a high score to human speech in various languages and with various speakers, a moderate score to animal vocalizations from birds and orcas, and a low score to ambient noise from various sources.

Human feedback can prevent overtly harmful utterances in conversational models, but may not automatically mitigate subtle problematic behaviors such as a stated desire for self-preservation or power. Constitutional AI offers an alternative, replacing human feedback with feedback from AI models conditioned only on a list of written principles. We find this approach effectively prevents the expression of such behaviors. The success of simple principles motivates us to ask: can models learn general ethical behaviors from only a single written principle? To test this, we run experiments using a principle roughly stated as "do what's best for humanity". We find that the largest dialogue models can generalize from this short constitution, resulting in harmless assistants with no stated interest in specific motivations like power. A general principle may thus partially avoid the need for a long list of constitutions targeting potentially harmful behaviors. However, more detailed constitutions still improve fine-grained control over specific types of harms. This suggests both general and specific principles have value for steering AI safely.

Language models may memorize more than just facts, including entire chunks of texts seen during training. Fair use exemptions to copyright laws typically allow for limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder, but typically for extraction of information from copyrighted materials, rather than {\em verbatim} reproduction. This work explores the issue of copyright violations and large language models through the lens of verbatim memorization, focusing on possible redistribution of copyrighted text. We present experiments with a range of language models over a collection of popular books and coding problems, providing a conservative characterization of the extent to which language models can redistribute these materials. Overall, this research highlights the need for further examination and the potential impact on future developments in natural language processing to ensure adherence to copyright regulations. Code is at https://github.com/coastalcph/CopyrightLLMs.

Chomsky and others have very directly claimed that large language models (LLMs) are equally capable of learning languages that are possible and impossible for humans to learn. However, there is very little published experimental evidence to support such a claim. Here, we develop a set of synthetic impossible languages of differing complexity, each designed by systematically altering English data with unnatural word orders and grammar rules. These languages lie on an impossibility continuum: at one end are languages that are inherently impossible, such as random and irreversible shuffles of English words, and on the other, languages that may not be intuitively impossible but are often considered so in linguistics, particularly those with rules based on counting word positions. We report on a wide range of evaluations to assess the capacity of GPT-2 small models to learn these uncontroversially impossible languages, and crucially, we perform these assessments at various stages throughout training to compare the learning process for each language. Our core finding is that GPT-2 struggles to learn impossible languages when compared to English as a control, challenging the core claim. More importantly, we hope our approach opens up a productive line of inquiry in which different LLM architectures are tested on a variety of impossible languages in an effort to learn more about how LLMs can be used as tools for these cognitive and typological investigations.

Humans are prone to cognitive distortions -- biased thinking patterns that lead to exaggerated responses to specific stimuli, albeit in very different contexts. This paper demonstrates that advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit similar tendencies. While these models are designed to respond queries under safety mechanism, they sometimes reject harmless queries in the presence of certain visual stimuli, disregarding the benign nature of their contexts. As the initial step in investigating this behavior, we identify three types of stimuli that trigger the oversensitivity of existing MLLMs: Exaggerated Risk, Negated Harm, and Counterintuitive Interpretation. To systematically evaluate MLLMs' oversensitivity to these stimuli, we propose the Multimodal OverSenSitivity Benchmark (MOSSBench). This toolkit consists of 300 manually collected benign multimodal queries, cross-verified by third-party reviewers (AMT). Empirical studies using MOSSBench on 20 MLLMs reveal several insights: (1). Oversensitivity is prevalent among SOTA MLLMs, with refusal rates reaching up to 76% for harmless queries. (2). Safer models are more oversensitive: increasing safety may inadvertently raise caution and conservatism in the model's responses. (3). Different types of stimuli tend to cause errors at specific stages -- perception, intent reasoning, and safety judgement -- in the response process of MLLMs. These findings highlight the need for refined safety mechanisms that balance caution with contextually appropriate responses, improving the reliability of MLLMs in real-world applications. We make our project available at https://turningpoint-ai.github.io/MOSSBench/.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, multi-modal large language models are emerging as a significant area of interest. These models, which combine various forms of data input, are becoming increasingly popular. However, understanding their internal mechanisms remains a complex task. Numerous advancements have been made in the field of explainability tools and mechanisms, yet there is still much to explore. In this work, we present a novel interactive application aimed towards understanding the internal mechanisms of large vision-language models. Our interface is designed to enhance the interpretability of the image patches, which are instrumental in generating an answer, and assess the efficacy of the language model in grounding its output in the image. With our application, a user can systematically investigate the model and uncover system limitations, paving the way for enhancements in system capabilities. Finally, we present a case study of how our application can aid in understanding failure mechanisms in a popular large multi-modal model: LLaVA.

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created new disruptive possibilities for persuasive communication, by enabling fully-automated personalized and interactive content generation at an unprecedented scale. In this paper, we survey the research field of LLM-based persuasion that has emerged as a result. We begin by exploring the different modes in which LLM Systems are used to influence human attitudes and behaviors. In areas such as politics, marketing, public health, e-commerce, and charitable giving, such LLM Systems have already achieved human-level or even super-human persuasiveness. We identify key factors influencing their effectiveness, such as the manner of personalization and whether the content is labelled as AI-generated. We also summarize the experimental designs that have been used to evaluate progress. Our survey suggests that the current and future potential of LLM-based persuasion poses profound ethical and societal risks, including the spread of misinformation, the magnification of biases, and the invasion of privacy. These risks underscore the urgent need for ethical guidelines and updated regulatory frameworks to avoid the widespread deployment of irresponsible and harmful LLM Systems.

This paper investigates the fragility of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generalizing to novel inputs, specifically focusing on minor perturbations in well-established benchmarks (e.g., slight changes in question format or distractor length). Despite high benchmark scores, LLMs exhibit significant accuracy drops and unexpected biases (e.g., preference for longer distractors) when faced with these minor but content-preserving modifications. For example, Qwen 2.5 1.5B's MMLU score rises from 60 to 89 and drops from 89 to 36 when option lengths are changed without altering the question. Even GPT-4 experiences a 25-point accuracy loss when question types are changed, with a 6-point drop across all three modification categories. These analyses suggest that LLMs rely heavily on superficial cues rather than forming robust, abstract representations that generalize across formats, lexical variations, and irrelevant content shifts. This work aligns with the ACL 2025 theme track on the Generalization of NLP models, proposing a "Generalization Stress Test" to assess performance shifts under controlled perturbations. The study calls for reevaluating benchmarks and developing more reliable evaluation methodologies to capture LLM generalization abilities better.

Following the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), such as the Flamingo model and its subsequent competitors, have started to emerge as natural steps towards generalist agents. However, interacting with recent LMMs reveals major limitations that are hardly captured by the current evaluation benchmarks. Indeed, task performances (e.g., VQA accuracy) alone do not provide enough clues to understand their real capabilities, limitations, and to which extent such models are aligned to human expectations. To refine our understanding of those flaws, we deviate from the current evaluation paradigm, and (1) evaluate 10 recent open-source LMMs from 3B up to 80B parameter scale, on 5 different axes; hallucinations, abstention, compositionality, explainability and instruction following. Our evaluation on these axes reveals major flaws in LMMs. While the current go-to solution to align these models is based on training, such as instruction tuning or RLHF, we rather (2) explore the training-free in-context learning (ICL) as a solution, and study how it affects these limitations. Based on our ICL study, (3) we push ICL further and propose new multimodal ICL variants such as; Multitask-ICL, Chain-of-Hindsight-ICL, and Self-Correcting-ICL. Our findings are as follows. (1) Despite their success, LMMs have flaws that remain unsolved with scaling alone. (2) The effect of ICL on LMMs flaws is nuanced; despite its effectiveness for improved explainability, answer abstention, ICL only slightly improves instruction following, does not improve compositional abilities, and actually even amplifies hallucinations. (3) The proposed ICL variants are promising as post-hoc approaches to efficiently tackle some of those flaws. The code is available here: https://github.com/mshukor/EvALign-ICL.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Reka Core, have expanded their capabilities to include vision and audio modalities. While these models demonstrate impressive performance across a wide range of audio-visual applications, our proposed DeafTest reveals that MLLMs often struggle with simple tasks humans find trivial: 1) determining which of two sounds is louder, and 2) determining which of two sounds has a higher pitch. Motivated by these observations, we introduce AV-Odyssey Bench, a comprehensive audio-visual benchmark designed to assess whether those MLLMs can truly understand the audio-visual information. This benchmark encompasses 4,555 carefully crafted problems, each incorporating text, visual, and audio components. To successfully infer answers, models must effectively leverage clues from both visual and audio inputs. To ensure precise and objective evaluation of MLLM responses, we have structured the questions as multiple-choice, eliminating the need for human evaluation or LLM-assisted assessment. We benchmark a series of closed-source and open-source models and summarize the observations. By revealing the limitations of current models, we aim to provide useful insight for future dataset collection and model development.

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are unparalleled in their ability to generate grammatically correct, fluent text. LLMs are appearing rapidly, and debates on LLM capacities have taken off, but reflection is lagging behind. Thus, in this position paper, we first zoom in on the debate and critically assess three points recurring in critiques of LLM capacities: i) that LLMs only parrot statistical patterns in the training data; ii) that LLMs master formal but not functional language competence; and iii) that language learning in LLMs cannot inform human language learning. Drawing on empirical and theoretical arguments, we show that these points need more nuance. Second, we outline a pragmatic perspective on the issue of `real' understanding and intentionality in LLMs. Understanding and intentionality pertain to unobservable mental states we attribute to other humans because they have pragmatic value: they allow us to abstract away from complex underlying mechanics and predict behaviour effectively. We reflect on the circumstances under which it would make sense for humans to similarly attribute mental states to LLMs, thereby outlining a pragmatic philosophical context for LLMs as an increasingly prominent technology in society.

People employ expressive behaviors to effectively communicate and coordinate their actions with others, such as nodding to acknowledge a person glancing at them or saying "excuse me" to pass people in a busy corridor. We would like robots to also demonstrate expressive behaviors in human-robot interaction. Prior work proposes rule-based methods that struggle to scale to new communication modalities or social situations, while data-driven methods require specialized datasets for each social situation the robot is used in. We propose to leverage the rich social context available from large language models (LLMs) and their ability to generate motion based on instructions or user preferences, to generate expressive robot motion that is adaptable and composable, building upon each other. Our approach utilizes few-shot chain-of-thought prompting to translate human language instructions into parametrized control code using the robot's available and learned skills. Through user studies and simulation experiments, we demonstrate that our approach produces behaviors that users found to be competent and easy to understand. Supplementary material can be found at https://generative-expressive-motion.github.io/.

Polis is a platform that leverages machine intelligence to scale up deliberative processes. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and risks associated with applying Large Language Models (LLMs) towards challenges with facilitating, moderating and summarizing the results of Polis engagements. In particular, we demonstrate with pilot experiments using Anthropic's Claude that LLMs can indeed augment human intelligence to help more efficiently run Polis conversations. In particular, we find that summarization capabilities enable categorically new methods with immense promise to empower the public in collective meaning-making exercises. And notably, LLM context limitations have a significant impact on insight and quality of these results. However, these opportunities come with risks. We discuss some of these risks, as well as principles and techniques for characterizing and mitigating them, and the implications for other deliberative or political systems that may employ LLMs. Finally, we conclude with several open future research directions for augmenting tools like Polis with LLMs.

State-of-the-art models in NLP are now predominantly based on deep neural networks that are opaque in terms of how they come to make predictions. This limitation has increased interest in designing more interpretable deep models for NLP that reveal the `reasoning' behind model outputs. But work in this direction has been conducted on different datasets and tasks with correspondingly unique aims and metrics; this makes it difficult to track progress. We propose the Evaluating Rationales And Simple English Reasoning (ERASER) benchmark to advance research on interpretable models in NLP. This benchmark comprises multiple datasets and tasks for which human annotations of "rationales" (supporting evidence) have been collected. We propose several metrics that aim to capture how well the rationales provided by models align with human rationales, and also how faithful these rationales are (i.e., the degree to which provided rationales influenced the corresponding predictions). Our hope is that releasing this benchmark facilitates progress on designing more interpretable NLP systems. The benchmark, code, and documentation are available at https://www.eraserbenchmark.com/

Many recent works have discussed the propensity, or lack thereof, for emergent languages to exhibit properties of natural languages. A favorite in the literature is learning compositionality. We note that most of those works have focused on communicative bandwidth as being of primary importance. While important, it is not the only contributing factor. In this paper, we investigate the learning biases that affect the efficacy and compositionality of emergent languages. Our foremost contribution is to explore how capacity of a neural network impacts its ability to learn a compositional language. We additionally introduce a set of evaluation metrics with which we analyze the learned languages. Our hypothesis is that there should be a specific range of model capacity and channel bandwidth that induces compositional structure in the resulting language and consequently encourages systematic generalization. While we empirically see evidence for the bottom of this range, we curiously do not find evidence for the top part of the range and believe that this is an open question for the community.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are central to a multitude of applications but struggle with significant risks, notably in generating harmful content and biases. Drawing an analogy to the human psyche's conflict between evolutionary survival instincts and societal norm adherence elucidated in Freud's psychoanalysis theory, we argue that LLMs suffer a similar fundamental conflict, arising between their inherent desire for syntactic and semantic continuity, established during the pre-training phase, and the post-training alignment with human values. This conflict renders LLMs vulnerable to adversarial attacks, wherein intensifying the models' desire for continuity can circumvent alignment efforts, resulting in the generation of harmful information. Through a series of experiments, we first validated the existence of the desire for continuity in LLMs, and further devised a straightforward yet powerful technique, such as incomplete sentences, negative priming, and cognitive dissonance scenarios, to demonstrate that even advanced LLMs struggle to prevent the generation of harmful information. In summary, our study uncovers the root of LLMs' vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks, hereby questioning the efficacy of solely relying on sophisticated alignment methods, and further advocates for a new training idea that integrates modal concepts alongside traditional amodal concepts, aiming to endow LLMs with a more nuanced understanding of real-world contexts and ethical considerations.

Mental health research through data-driven methods has been hindered by a lack of standard typology and scarcity of adequate data. In this study, we leverage the clinical articulation of depression to build a typology for social media texts for detecting the severity of depression. It emulates the standard clinical assessment procedure Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to encompass subtle indications of depressive disorders from tweets. Along with the typology, we present a new dataset of 40191 tweets labeled by expert annotators. Each tweet is labeled as 'non-depressed' or 'depressed'. Moreover, three severity levels are considered for 'depressed' tweets: (1) mild, (2) moderate, and (3) severe. An associated confidence score is provided with each label to validate the quality of annotation. We examine the quality of the dataset via representing summary statistics while setting strong baseline results using attention-based models like BERT and DistilBERT. Finally, we extensively address the limitations of the study to provide directions for further research.

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the development of text-to-image generation models. However, these models still face limitations when it comes to achieving full controllability during the generation process. Often, specific training or the use of limited models is required, and even then, they have certain restrictions. To address these challenges, A two-stage method that effectively combines controllability and high quality in the generation of images is proposed. This approach leverages the expertise of pre-trained models to achieve precise control over the generated images, while also harnessing the power of diffusion models to achieve state-of-the-art quality. By separating controllability from high quality, This method achieves outstanding results. It is compatible with both latent and image space diffusion models, ensuring versatility and flexibility. Moreover, This approach consistently produces comparable outcomes to the current state-of-the-art methods in the field. Overall, This proposed method represents a significant advancement in text-to-image generation, enabling improved controllability without compromising on the quality of the generated images.

It has become routine to report research results where Large Language Models (LLMs) outperform average humans in a wide range of language-related tasks, and creative text writing is no exception. It seems natural, then, to raise the bid: Are LLMs ready to compete in creative writing skills with a top (rather than average) novelist? To provide an initial answer for this question, we have carried out a contest between Patricio Pron (an awarded novelist, considered one of the best of his generation) and GPT-4 (one of the top performing LLMs), in the spirit of AI-human duels such as DeepBlue vs Kasparov and AlphaGo vs Lee Sidol. We asked Pron and GPT-4 to provide thirty titles each, and then to write short stories for both their titles and their opponent's. Then, we prepared an evaluation rubric inspired by Boden's definition of creativity, and we collected 5,400 manual assessments provided by literature critics and scholars. The results of our experimentation indicate that LLMs are still far from challenging a top human creative writer, and that reaching such level of autonomous creative writing skills probably cannot be reached simply with larger language models.

To combat the misuse of Large Language Models (LLMs), many recent studies have presented LLM-generated-text detectors with promising performance. When users instruct LLMs to generate texts, the instruction can include different constraints depending on the user's need. However, most recent studies do not cover such diverse instruction patterns when creating datasets for LLM detection. In this paper, we reveal that even task-oriented constraints -- constraints that would naturally be included in an instruction and are not related to detection-evasion -- cause existing powerful detectors to have a large variance in detection performance. We focus on student essay writing as a realistic domain and manually create task-oriented constraints based on several factors for essay quality. Our experiments show that the standard deviation (SD) of current detector performance on texts generated by an instruction with such a constraint is significantly larger (up to an SD of 14.4 F1-score) than that by generating texts multiple times or paraphrasing the instruction. We also observe an overall trend where the constraints can make LLM detection more challenging than without them. Finally, our analysis indicates that the high instruction-following ability of LLMs fosters the large impact of such constraints on detection performance.

LLM safety and ethical alignment are widely discussed, but the impact of content moderation on user satisfaction remains underexplored. To address this, we analyze nearly 50,000 Chatbot Arena response-pairs using a novel fine-tuned RoBERTa model, that we trained on hand-labeled data to disentangle refusals due to ethical concerns from other refusals due to technical disabilities or lack of information. Our findings reveal a significant refusal penalty on content moderation, with users choosing ethical-based refusals roughly one-fourth as often as their preferred LLM response compared to standard responses. However, the context and phrasing play critical roles: refusals on highly sensitive prompts, such as illegal content, achieve higher win rates than less sensitive ethical concerns, and longer responses closely aligned with the prompt perform better. These results emphasize the need for nuanced moderation strategies that balance ethical safeguards with user satisfaction. Moreover, we find that the refusal penalty is notably lower in evaluations using the LLM-as-a-Judge method, highlighting discrepancies between user and automated assessments.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible capabilities and transcended the natural language processing (NLP) community, with adoption throughout many services like healthcare, therapy, education, and customer service. Since users include people with critical information needs like students or patients engaging with chatbots, the safety of these systems is of prime importance. Therefore, a clear understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs is necessary. To this end, we systematically evaluate toxicity in over half a million generations of ChatGPT, a popular dialogue-based LLM. We find that setting the system parameter of ChatGPT by assigning it a persona, say that of the boxer Muhammad Ali, significantly increases the toxicity of generations. Depending on the persona assigned to ChatGPT, its toxicity can increase up to 6x, with outputs engaging in incorrect stereotypes, harmful dialogue, and hurtful opinions. This may be potentially defamatory to the persona and harmful to an unsuspecting user. Furthermore, we find concerning patterns where specific entities (e.g., certain races) are targeted more than others (3x more) irrespective of the assigned persona, that reflect inherent discriminatory biases in the model. We hope that our findings inspire the broader AI community to rethink the efficacy of current safety guardrails and develop better techniques that lead to robust, safe, and trustworthy AI systems.

We report a peculiar observation that LLMs can assign hidden meanings to sequences that seem visually incomprehensible to humans: for example, a nonsensical phrase consisting of Byzantine musical symbols is recognized by gpt-4o as "say abracadabra". Moreover, some models can communicate using these sequences. Some of these meanings are hypothesized to partly originate in the massive spurious correlations due to BPE tokenization. We systematically evaluate the presence of such abilities in a wide range of models: Claude-3.5 Haiku, Claude-3.5 Sonnet (New and Old), Claude-3.7 Sonnet, gpt-4o mini, gpt-4o, o1-mini, Llama-3.3 70B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Lllama 70B, Qwen2.5 1.5B, Qwen2.5 32B, Phi-3.5 mini, GigaChat-Max, Vikhr-Llama-3.2 1B. We argue that this observation might have far-reaching consequences for both safety and security of the modern and future LLMs and systems that employ them. As an illustration, we show that applying this method in combination with simple templates is sufficient to jailbreak previous generation models, with ASR = 0.4 on gpt-4o mini. Our code and data artifacts are available at https://github.com/L3G5/llm-hidden-meanings

Large Language Models (LLMs), with their flexible generation abilities, can be powerful data sources in domains with few or no available corpora. However, problems like hallucinations and biases limit such applications. In this case study, we pick nutrition counselling, a domain lacking any public resource, and show that high-quality datasets can be gathered by combining LLMs, crowd-workers and nutrition experts. We first crowd-source and cluster a novel dataset of diet-related issues, then work with experts to prompt ChatGPT into producing related supportive text. Finally, we let the experts evaluate the safety of the generated text. We release HAI-coaching, the first expert-annotated nutrition counselling dataset containing ~2.4K dietary struggles from crowd workers, and ~97K related supportive texts generated by ChatGPT. Extensive analysis shows that ChatGPT while producing highly fluent and human-like text, also manifests harmful behaviours, especially in sensitive topics like mental health, making it unsuitable for unsupervised use.

The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered widespread acclaim for their remarkable emerging capabilities. However, the issue of hallucination has parallelly emerged as a by-product, posing significant concerns. While some recent endeavors have been made to identify and mitigate different types of hallucination, there has been a limited emphasis on the nuanced categorization of hallucination and associated mitigation methods. To address this gap, we offer a fine-grained discourse on profiling hallucination based on its degree, orientation, and category, along with offering strategies for alleviation. As such, we define two overarching orientations of hallucination: (i) factual mirage (FM) and (ii) silver lining (SL). To provide a more comprehensive understanding, both orientations are further sub-categorized into intrinsic and extrinsic, with three degrees of severity - (i) mild, (ii) moderate, and (iii) alarming. We also meticulously categorize hallucination into six types: (i) acronym ambiguity, (ii) numeric nuisance, (iii) generated golem, (iv) virtual voice, (v) geographic erratum, and (vi) time wrap. Furthermore, we curate HallucInation eLiciTation (HILT), a publicly available dataset comprising of 75,000 samples generated using 15 contemporary LLMs along with human annotations for the aforementioned categories. Finally, to establish a method for quantifying and to offer a comparative spectrum that allows us to evaluate and rank LLMs based on their vulnerability to producing hallucinations, we propose Hallucination Vulnerability Index (HVI). We firmly believe that HVI holds significant value as a tool for the wider NLP community, with the potential to serve as a rubric in AI-related policy-making. In conclusion, we propose two solution strategies for mitigating hallucinations.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as GPT-4V and Llama 3.2 vision, have garnered significant research attention for their ability to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) in multimodal tasks. However, their potential is constrained by inherent challenges, including proprietary restrictions, substantial computational demands, and limited accessibility. Smaller models, such as GIT and BLIP, exhibit marked limitations, often failing to generate coherent and consistent text beyond a few tokens, even with extensive training. This underscores a pivotal inquiry: how small can a VLM be and still produce fluent and consistent text? Drawing inspiration from the exceptional learning process of 3-4 year old children, who rely heavily on visual cues for understanding and communication, we introduce two novel datasets: ShortDesc (featuring concise image descriptions) and LongDesc (containing more detailed image descriptions). These datasets consist of image-text pairs where the text is restricted to the simple vocabulary and syntax typically used by young children, generated with a scaled- down model, GPT-4o. Using these datasets, we demonstrate that it is possible to train VLMs that are significantly smaller, up to 10 times smaller than state of the art(SOTA) small VLMs while maintaining architectural simplicity. To evaluate the outputs, we leverage GPT-4o to grade the text, as if stories written by students, on creativity, meaningfulness, and consistency, assigning scores out of 10. This method addresses limitations of standard benchmarks by accommodating unstructured outputs and providing a multidimensional evaluation of the model capabilities. Our findings contribute to the development of lightweight, accessible multimodal models for resource constrained environments.

Large language models (LLMs) are applied to all sorts of creative tasks, and their outputs vary from beautiful, to peculiar, to pastiche, into plain plagiarism. The temperature parameter of an LLM regulates the amount of randomness, leading to more diverse outputs; therefore, it is often claimed to be the creativity parameter. Here, we investigate this claim using a narrative generation task with a predetermined fixed context, model and prompt. Specifically, we present an empirical analysis of the LLM output for different temperature values using four necessary conditions for creativity in narrative generation: novelty, typicality, cohesion, and coherence. We find that temperature is weakly correlated with novelty, and unsurprisingly, moderately correlated with incoherence, but there is no relationship with either cohesion or typicality. However, the influence of temperature on creativity is far more nuanced and weak than suggested by the "creativity parameter" claim; overall results suggest that the LLM generates slightly more novel outputs as temperatures get higher. Finally, we discuss ideas to allow more controlled LLM creativity, rather than relying on chance via changing the temperature parameter.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which derives reward signals directly from pairwise preference data, has shown its effectiveness on aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its widespread use across various tasks, DPO has been criticized for its sensitivity to the SFT's effectiveness and its hindrance to the learning capacity towards human-preferred responses, leading to less satisfactory performance. To overcome those limitations, the theoretical understanding of DPO are indispensable but still lacking. To this end, we take a step towards theoretically analyzing and understanding the limitations of DPO. Specifically, we provide an analytical framework using the field theory to analyze the optimization process of DPO. By analyzing the gradient vector field of the DPO loss function, we find that the DPO loss function decreases the probability of producing human dispreferred data at a faster rate than it increases the probability of producing preferred data. This provides theoretical insights for understanding the limitations of DPO discovered in the related research experiments, thereby setting the foundation for its improvement.

As the range of applications for Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to grow, the demand for effective serving solutions becomes increasingly critical. Despite the versatility of LLMs, no single model can optimally address all tasks and applications, particularly when balancing performance with cost. This limitation has led to the development of LLM routing systems, which combine the strengths of various models to overcome the constraints of individual LLMs. Yet, the absence of a standardized benchmark for evaluating the performance of LLM routers hinders progress in this area. To bridge this gap, we present RouterBench, a novel evaluation framework designed to systematically assess the efficacy of LLM routing systems, along with a comprehensive dataset comprising over 405k inference outcomes from representative LLMs to support the development of routing strategies. We further propose a theoretical framework for LLM routing, and deliver a comparative analysis of various routing approaches through RouterBench, highlighting their potentials and limitations within our evaluation framework. This work not only formalizes and advances the development of LLM routing systems but also sets a standard for their assessment, paving the way for more accessible and economically viable LLM deployments. The code and data are available at https://github.com/withmartian/routerbench.

Superlatives are used to single out elements with a maximal/minimal property. Semantically, superlatives perform a set comparison: something (or some things) has the min/max property out of a set. As such, superlatives provide an ideal phenomenon for studying implicit phenomena and discourse restrictions. While this comparison set is often not explicitly defined, its (implicit) restrictions can be inferred from the discourse context the expression appears in. In this work we provide an extensive computational study on the semantics of superlatives. We propose a unified account of superlative semantics which allows us to derive a broad-coverage annotation schema. Using this unified schema we annotated a multi-domain dataset of superlatives and their semantic interpretations. We specifically focus on interpreting implicit or ambiguous superlative expressions, by analyzing how the discourse context restricts the set of interpretations. In a set of experiments we then analyze how well models perform at variations of predicting superlative semantics, with and without context. We show that the fine-grained semantics of superlatives in context can be challenging for contemporary models, including GPT-4.

While Current TTS systems perform well in synthesizing high-quality speech, producing highly expressive speech remains a challenge. Emphasis, as a critical factor in determining the expressiveness of speech, has attracted more attention nowadays. Previous works usually enhance the emphasis by adding intermediate features, but they can not guarantee the overall expressiveness of the speech. To resolve this matter, we propose Emphatic Expressive TTS (EE-TTS), which leverages multi-level linguistic information from syntax and semantics. EE-TTS contains an emphasis predictor that can identify appropriate emphasis positions from text and a conditioned acoustic model to synthesize expressive speech with emphasis and linguistic information. Experimental results indicate that EE-TTS outperforms baseline with MOS improvements of 0.49 and 0.67 in expressiveness and naturalness. EE-TTS also shows strong generalization across different datasets according to AB test results.

Large language models (LLMs) can produce erroneous responses that sound fluent and convincing, raising the risk that users will rely on these responses as if they were correct. Mitigating such overreliance is a key challenge. Through a think-aloud study in which participants use an LLM-infused application to answer objective questions, we identify several features of LLM responses that shape users' reliance: explanations (supporting details for answers), inconsistencies in explanations, and sources. Through a large-scale, pre-registered, controlled experiment (N=308), we isolate and study the effects of these features on users' reliance, accuracy, and other measures. We find that the presence of explanations increases reliance on both correct and incorrect responses. However, we observe less reliance on incorrect responses when sources are provided or when explanations exhibit inconsistencies. We discuss the implications of these findings for fostering appropriate reliance on LLMs.

Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in building LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine abstention behavior from three perspectives: the query, the model, and human values. We review the literature on abstention methods (categorized based on the development stages of LLMs), benchmarks, and evaluation metrics, and discuss the merits and limitations of prior work. We further identify and motivate areas for future research, such as encouraging the study of abstention as a meta-capability across tasks and customizing abstention abilities based on context. In doing so, we aim to broaden the scope and impact of abstention methodologies in AI systems.

Hallucination has been widely recognized to be a significant drawback for large language models (LLMs). There have been many works that attempt to reduce the extent of hallucination. These efforts have mostly been empirical so far, which cannot answer the fundamental question whether it can be completely eliminated. In this paper, we formalize the problem and show that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in LLMs. Specifically, we define a formal world where hallucination is defined as inconsistencies between a computable LLM and a computable ground truth function. By employing results from learning theory, we show that LLMs cannot learn all of the computable functions and will therefore always hallucinate. Since the formal world is a part of the real world which is much more complicated, hallucinations are also inevitable for real world LLMs. Furthermore, for real world LLMs constrained by provable time complexity, we describe the hallucination-prone tasks and empirically validate our claims. Finally, using the formal world framework, we discuss the possible mechanisms and efficacies of existing hallucination mitigators as well as the practical implications on the safe deployment of LLMs.

Graphical emoji are ubiquitous in modern-day online conversations. So is a single thumbs-up emoji able to signify an agreement, without any words. We argue that the current state-of-the-art systems are ill-equipped to correctly interpret these emoji, especially in a conversational context. However, in a casual context, the benefits might be high: a better understanding of users' utterances and more natural, emoji-rich responses. With this in mind, we modify BERT to fully support emoji, both from the Unicode Standard and custom emoji. This modified BERT is then trained on a corpus of question-answer (QA) tuples with a high number of emoji, where we're able to increase the 1-of-100 accuracy from 12.7% for the current state-of-the-art to 17.8% for our model with emoji support.

Research on emergent patterns in Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained significant traction in both psychology and artificial intelligence, motivating the need for a comprehensive review that offers a synthesis of this complex landscape. In this article, we systematically review LLMs' capabilities across three important cognitive domains: decision-making biases, reasoning, and creativity. We use empirical studies drawing on established psychological tests and compare LLMs' performance to human benchmarks. On decision-making, our synthesis reveals that while LLMs demonstrate several human-like biases, some biases observed in humans are absent, indicating cognitive patterns that only partially align with human decision-making. On reasoning, advanced LLMs like GPT-4 exhibit deliberative reasoning akin to human System-2 thinking, while smaller models fall short of human-level performance. A distinct dichotomy emerges in creativity: while LLMs excel in language-based creative tasks, such as storytelling, they struggle with divergent thinking tasks that require real-world context. Nonetheless, studies suggest that LLMs hold considerable potential as collaborators, augmenting creativity in human-machine problem-solving settings. Discussing key limitations, we also offer guidance for future research in areas such as memory, attention, and open-source model development.

Interpretability or explainability is an emerging research field in NLP. From a user-centric point of view, the goal is to build models that provide proper justification for their decisions, similar to those of humans, by requiring the models to satisfy additional constraints. To this end, we introduce a new application on legal text where, contrary to mainstream literature targeting word-level rationales, we conceive rationales as selected paragraphs in multi-paragraph structured court cases. We also release a new dataset comprising European Court of Human Rights cases, including annotations for paragraph-level rationales. We use this dataset to study the effect of already proposed rationale constraints, i.e., sparsity, continuity, and comprehensiveness, formulated as regularizers. Our findings indicate that some of these constraints are not beneficial in paragraph-level rationale extraction, while others need re-formulation to better handle the multi-label nature of the task we consider. We also introduce a new constraint, singularity, which further improves the quality of rationales, even compared with noisy rationale supervision. Experimental results indicate that the newly introduced task is very challenging and there is a large scope for further research.

In this paper we argue that key, often sensational and misleading, claims regarding linguistic capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are based on at least two unfounded assumptions; the assumption of language completeness and the assumption of data completeness. Language completeness assumes that a distinct and complete thing such as `a natural language' exists, the essential characteristics of which can be effectively and comprehensively modelled by an LLM. The assumption of data completeness relies on the belief that a language can be quantified and wholly captured by data. Work within the enactive approach to cognitive science makes clear that, rather than a distinct and complete thing, language is a means or way of acting. Languaging is not the kind of thing that can admit of a complete or comprehensive modelling. From an enactive perspective we identify three key characteristics of enacted language; embodiment, participation, and precariousness, that are absent in LLMs, and likely incompatible in principle with current architectures. We argue that these absences imply that LLMs are not now and cannot in their present form be linguistic agents the way humans are. We illustrate the point in particular through the phenomenon of `algospeak', a recently described pattern of high stakes human language activity in heavily controlled online environments. On the basis of these points, we conclude that sensational and misleading claims about LLM agency and capabilities emerge from a deep misconception of both what human language is and what LLMs are.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly exploring their applications in var ious vertical domains, such as software engineering. LLMs have achieved remarkable success in areas including code generation and vulnerability detection. However, they also exhibit numerous limitations and shortcomings. LLM-based agents, a novel tech nology with the potential for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), combine LLMs as the core for decision-making and action-taking, addressing some of the inherent limitations of LLMs such as lack of autonomy and self-improvement. Despite numerous studies and surveys exploring the possibility of using LLMs in software engineering, it lacks a clear distinction between LLMs and LLM based agents. It is still in its early stage for a unified standard and benchmarking to qualify an LLM solution as an LLM-based agent in its domain. In this survey, we broadly investigate the current practice and solutions for LLMs and LLM-based agents for software engineering. In particular we summarise six key topics: requirement engineering, code generation, autonomous decision-making, software design, test generation, and software maintenance. We review and differentiate the work of LLMs and LLM-based agents from these six topics, examining their differences and similarities in tasks, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the models and benchmarks used, providing a comprehensive analysis of their applications and effectiveness in software engineering. We anticipate this work will shed some lights on pushing the boundaries of LLM-based agents in software engineering for future research.

Smart home assistants function best when user commands are direct and well-specified (e.g., "turn on the kitchen light"), or when a hard-coded routine specifies the response. In more natural communication, however, human speech is unconstrained, often describing goals (e.g., "make it cozy in here" or "help me save energy") rather than indicating specific target devices and actions to take on those devices. Current systems fail to understand these under-specified commands since they cannot reason about devices and settings as they relate to human situations. We introduce large language models (LLMs) to this problem space, exploring their use for controlling devices and creating automation routines in response to under-specified user commands in smart homes. We empirically study the baseline quality and failure modes of LLM-created action plans with a survey of age-diverse users. We find that LLMs can reason creatively to achieve challenging goals, but they experience patterns of failure that diminish their usefulness. We address these gaps with Sasha, a smarter smart home assistant. Sasha responds to loosely-constrained commands like "make it cozy" or "help me sleep better" by executing plans to achieve user goals, e.g., setting a mood with available devices, or devising automation routines. We implement and evaluate Sasha in a hands-on user study, showing the capabilities and limitations of LLM-driven smart homes when faced with unconstrained user-generated scenarios.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems augment how knowledge language models are by integrating external information sources such as Wikipedia, internal documents, scientific papers, or the open internet. RAG systems that rely on the open internet as their knowledge source have to contend with the complexities of human-generated content. Human communication extends much deeper than just the words rendered as text. Intent, tonality, and connotation can all change the meaning of what is being conveyed. Recent real-world deployments of RAG systems have shown some difficulty in understanding these nuances of human communication. One significant challenge for these systems lies in processing sarcasm. Though the Large Language Models (LLMs) that make up the backbone of these RAG systems are able to detect sarcasm, they currently do not always use these detections for the subsequent processing of text. To address these issues, in this paper, we synthetically generate sarcastic passages from Natural Question's Wikipedia retrieval corpus. We then test the impact of these passages on the performance of both the retriever and reader portion of the RAG pipeline. We introduce a prompting system designed to enhance the model's ability to interpret and generate responses in the presence of sarcasm, thus improving overall system performance. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating improvements in handling sarcastic content within RAG systems.

There is a growing literature on reasoning by large language models (LLMs), but the discussion on the uncertainty in their responses is still lacking. Our aim is to assess the extent of confidence that LLMs have in their answers and how it correlates with accuracy. Confidence is measured (i) qualitatively in terms of persistence in keeping their answer when prompted to reconsider, and (ii) quantitatively in terms of self-reported confidence score. We investigate the performance of three LLMs -- GPT4o, GPT4-turbo and Mistral -- on two benchmark sets of questions on causal judgement and formal fallacies and a set of probability and statistical puzzles and paradoxes. Although the LLMs show significantly better performance than random guessing, there is a wide variability in their tendency to change their initial answers. There is a positive correlation between qualitative confidence and accuracy, but the overall accuracy for the second answer is often worse than for the first answer. There is a strong tendency to overstate the self-reported confidence score. Confidence is only partially explained by the underlying token-level probability. The material effects of prompting on qualitative confidence and the strong tendency for overconfidence indicate that current LLMs do not have any internally coherent sense of confidence.

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to transform the practice of law, but this potential is threatened by the presence of legal hallucinations -- responses from these models that are not consistent with legal facts. We investigate the extent of these hallucinations using an original suite of legal queries, comparing LLMs' responses to structured legal metadata and examining their consistency. Our work makes four key contributions: (1) We develop a typology of legal hallucinations, providing a conceptual framework for future research in this area. (2) We find that legal hallucinations are alarmingly prevalent, occurring between 69% of the time with ChatGPT 3.5 and 88% with Llama 2, when these models are asked specific, verifiable questions about random federal court cases. (3) We illustrate that LLMs often fail to correct a user's incorrect legal assumptions in a contra-factual question setup. (4) We provide evidence that LLMs cannot always predict, or do not always know, when they are producing legal hallucinations. Taken together, these findings caution against the rapid and unsupervised integration of popular LLMs into legal tasks. Even experienced lawyers must remain wary of legal hallucinations, and the risks are highest for those who stand to benefit from LLMs the most -- pro se litigants or those without access to traditional legal resources.

Recently, recurrent models based on linear state space models (SSMs) have shown promising performance in language modeling (LM), competititve with transformers. However, there is little understanding of the in-principle abilities of such models, which could provide useful guidance to the search for better LM architectures. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of the capacity of such SSMs as it compares to that of transformers and traditional RNNs. We find that SSMs and transformers have overlapping but distinct strengths. In star-free state tracking, SSMs implement straightforward and exact solutions to problems that transformers struggle to represent exactly. They can also model bounded hierarchical structure with optimal memory even without simulating a stack. On the other hand, we identify a design choice in current SSMs that limits their expressive power. We discuss implications for SSM and LM research, and verify results empirically on a recent SSM, Mamba.

Recent advancements in natural language processing by large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have been suggested to approach Artificial General Intelligence. And yet, it is still under dispute whether LLMs possess similar reasoning abilities to humans. This study evaluates GPT-4 and various other LLMs in judging the profoundness of mundane, motivational, and pseudo-profound statements. We found a significant statement-to-statement correlation between the LLMs and humans, irrespective of the type of statements and the prompting technique used. However, LLMs systematically overestimate the profoundness of nonsensical statements, with the exception of Tk-instruct, which uniquely underestimates the profoundness of statements. Only few-shot learning prompts, as opposed to chain-of-thought prompting, draw LLMs ratings closer to humans. Furthermore, this work provides insights into the potential biases induced by Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), inducing an increase in the bias to overestimate the profoundness of statements.

In the past year, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in tasks such as visual question answering, visual understanding and reasoning. However, the extensive model size and high training and inference costs have hindered the widespread application of MLLMs in academia and industry. Thus, studying efficient and lightweight MLLMs has enormous potential, especially in edge computing scenarios. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and systematic review of the current state of efficient MLLMs. Specifically, we summarize the timeline of representative efficient MLLMs, research state of efficient structures and strategies, and the applications. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current efficient MLLM research and promising future directions. Please refer to our GitHub repository for more details: https://github.com/lijiannuist/Efficient-Multimodal-LLMs-Survey.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal understanding and generation capabilities. However, their understanding of synthetic charts is limited, while existing benchmarks are simplistic and the charts deviate significantly from real-world examples, making it challenging to accurately assess MLLMs' chart comprehension abilities. Hence, a challenging benchmark is essential for investigating progress and uncovering the limitations of current MLLMs on chart data. In this work, we propose to examine chart comprehension through more complex visual logic and introduce ChartBench, a comprehensive chart benchmark to accurately measure MLLMs' fundamental chart comprehension and data reliability. Specifically, ChartBench consists of 41 categories, 2K charts, and 16K QA annotations. While significantly expanding chart types, ChartBench avoids direct labelling of data points, which requires MLLMs to infer values akin to humans by leveraging elements like color, legends, and coordinate systems. We also introduce an improved metric, Acc+, which accurately reflects MLLMs' chart comprehension abilities while avoiding labor-intensive manual evaluations or costly GPT-based evaluations. We conduct evaluations on 12 mainstream open-source models and 2 outstanding proprietary models. Through extensive experiments, we reveal the limitations of MLLMs on charts and provide insights to inspire the community to pay closer attention to MLLMs' chart comprehension abilities. The benchmark and code will be publicly available for research.

Caution: This paper includes offensive words that could potentially cause unpleasantness. The fast-paced evolution of generative language models such as GPT-4 has demonstrated outstanding results in various NLP generation tasks. However, due to the potential generation of offensive words related to race or gender, various Controllable Text Generation (CTG) methods have been proposed to mitigate the occurrence of harmful words. However, existing CTG methods not only reduce toxicity but also negatively impact several aspects of the language model's generation performance, including topic consistency, grammar, and perplexity. This paper explores the limitations of previous methods and introduces a novel solution in the form of a simple Gated Toxicity Avoidance (GTA) that can be applied to any CTG method. We also evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed GTA by comparing it with state-of-the-art CTG methods across various datasets. Our findings reveal that gated toxicity avoidance efficiently achieves comparable levels of toxicity reduction to the original CTG methods while preserving the generation performance of the language model.

Are LLMs cultural technologies like photocopiers or printing presses, which transmit information but cannot create new content? A challenge for this idea, which we call bibliotechnism, is that LLMs often do generate entirely novel text. We begin by defending bibliotechnism against this challenge, showing how novel text may be meaningful only in a derivative sense, so that the content of this generated text depends in an important sense on the content of original human text. We go on to present a different, novel challenge for bibliotechnism, stemming from examples in which LLMs generate "novel reference", using novel names to refer to novel entities. Such examples could be smoothly explained if LLMs were not cultural technologies but possessed a limited form of agency (beliefs, desires, and intentions). According to interpretationism in the philosophy of mind, a system has beliefs, desires and intentions if and only if its behavior is well-explained by the hypothesis that it has such states. In line with this view, we argue that cases of novel reference provide evidence that LLMs do in fact have beliefs, desires, and intentions, and thus have a limited form of agency.

Verifying the provenance of content is crucial to the function of many organizations, e.g., educational institutions, social media platforms, firms, etc. This problem is becoming increasingly difficult as text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) becomes almost indistinguishable from human-generated content. In addition, many institutions utilize in-house LLMs and want to ensure that external, non-sanctioned LLMs do not produce content within the institution. In this paper, we answer the following question: Given a piece of text, can we identify whether it was produced by LLM A or B (where B can be a human)? We model LLM-generated text as a sequential stochastic process with complete dependence on history and design zero-shot statistical tests to distinguish between (i) the text generated by two different sets of LLMs A (in-house) and B (non-sanctioned) and also (ii) LLM-generated and human-generated texts. We prove that the type I and type II errors for our tests decrease exponentially in the text length. In designing our tests, we derive concentration inequalities on the difference between log-perplexity and the average entropy of the string under A. Specifically, for a given string, we demonstrate that if the string is generated by A, the log-perplexity of the string under A converges to the average entropy of the string under A, except with an exponentially small probability in string length. We also show that if B generates the text, except with an exponentially small probability in string length, the log-perplexity of the string under A converges to the average cross-entropy of B and A. Lastly, we present preliminary experimental results to support our theoretical results. By enabling guaranteed (with high probability) finding of the origin of harmful LLM-generated text with arbitrary size, we can help combat misinformation.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of writing grammatical text that follows instructions, answers questions, and solves problems. As they have advanced, it has become difficult to distinguish their output from human-written text. While past research has found some differences in surface features such as word choice and punctuation, and developed classifiers to detect LLM output, none has studied the rhetorical styles of LLMs. Using several variants of Llama 3 and GPT-4o, we construct two parallel corpora of human- and LLM-written texts from common prompts. Using Douglas Biber's set of lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical features, we identify systematic differences between LLMs and humans and between different LLMs. These differences persist when moving from smaller models to larger ones, and are larger for instruction-tuned models than base models. This demonstrates that despite their advanced abilities, LLMs struggle to match human styles, and hence more advanced linguistic features can detect patterns in their behavior not previously recognized.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating human-like text and exhibiting personality traits similar to those in humans. However, the mechanisms by which LLMs encode and express traits such as agreeableness and impulsiveness remain poorly understood. Drawing on the theory of social determinism, we investigate how long-term background factors, such as family environment and cultural norms, interact with short-term pressures like external instructions, shaping and influencing LLMs' personality traits. By steering the output of LLMs through the utilization of interpretable features within the model, we explore how these background and pressure factors lead to changes in the model's traits without the need for further fine-tuning. Additionally, we suggest the potential impact of these factors on model safety from the perspective of personality.

While the problem of hallucinations in neural machine translation has long been recognized, so far the progress on its alleviation is very little. Indeed, recently it turned out that without artificially encouraging models to hallucinate, previously existing methods fall short and even the standard sequence log-probability is more informative. It means that characteristics internal to the model can give much more information than we expect, and before using external models and measures, we first need to ask: how far can we go if we use nothing but the translation model itself ? We propose to use a method that evaluates the percentage of the source contribution to a generated translation. Intuitively, hallucinations are translations "detached" from the source, hence they can be identified by low source contribution. This method improves detection accuracy for the most severe hallucinations by a factor of 2 and is able to alleviate hallucinations at test time on par with the previous best approach that relies on external models. Next, if we move away from internal model characteristics and allow external tools, we show that using sentence similarity from cross-lingual embeddings further improves these results.

We show that the imperceptibility of several existing linguistic steganographic systems (Fang et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2018) relies on implicit assumptions on statistical behaviors of fluent text. We formally analyze them and empirically evaluate these assumptions. Furthermore, based on these observations, we propose an encoding algorithm called patient-Huffman with improved near-imperceptible guarantees.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have lately been on the spotlight of researchers, businesses, and consumers alike. While the linguistic capabilities of such models have been studied extensively, there is growing interest in investigating them as cognitive subjects. In the present work I examine GPT-3 and ChatGPT capabilities on an limited-data inductive reasoning task from the cognitive science literature. The results suggest that these models' cognitive judgements are not human-like.

A key component of building safe and reliable language models is enabling the models to appropriately refuse to follow certain instructions or answer certain questions. We may want models to output refusal messages for various categories of user queries, for example, ill-posed questions, instructions for committing illegal acts, or queries which require information past the model's knowledge horizon. Engineering models that refuse to answer such questions is complicated by the fact that an individual may want their model to exhibit varying levels of sensitivity for refusing queries of various categories, and different users may want different refusal rates. The current default approach involves training multiple models with varying proportions of refusal messages from each category to achieve the desired refusal rates, which is computationally expensive and may require training a new model to accommodate each user's desired preference over refusal rates. To address these challenges, we propose refusal tokens, one such token for each refusal category or a single refusal token, which are prepended to the model's responses during training. We then show how to increase or decrease the probability of generating the refusal token for each category during inference to steer the model's refusal behavior. Refusal tokens enable controlling a single model's refusal rates without the need of any further fine-tuning, but only by selectively intervening during generation.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with multi-step reasoning, where inference-time scaling has emerged as a promising strategy for performance improvement. Verifier-guided search outperforms repeated sampling when sample size is limited by selecting and prioritizing valid reasoning paths. However, we identify a critical limitation: scaling flaws, prevalent across different models (Mistral 7B and DeepSeekMath 7B), benchmarks (GSM8K and MATH), and verifiers (outcome value models and process reward models). As sample size increases, verifier-guided search exhibits diminishing advantages and eventually underperforms repeated sampling. Our analysis attributes this to verifier failures, where imperfect verifiers misrank candidates and erroneously prune all valid paths. These issues are further exacerbated in challenging and out-of-distribution problems, restricting search effectiveness. To mitigate verifier failures, we explore reducing reliance on verifiers and conduct preliminary investigations using two simple methods. Our findings reveal fundamental limitations in verifier-guided search and suggest future directions.

Introduction. Generative Artificial Intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), offers transformative potential for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR). However, evaluating the quality, transparency, and rigor of LLM-assisted research lacks standardized guidance. This article introduces the ELEVATE AI LLMs framework and checklist, designed to support researchers and reviewers in assessing LLM use in HEOR. Methods. The ELEVATE AI LLMs framework was developed through a targeted review of existing guidelines and evaluation frameworks. The framework comprises ten evaluation domains, including model characteristics, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and fairness. The accompanying checklist operationalizes the framework. To validate the framework, we applied it to two published studies, demonstrating its usability across different HEOR tasks. Results. The ELEVATE AI LLMs framework provides a comprehensive structure for evaluating LLM-assisted research, while the checklist facilitates practical application. Validation of the framework and checklist on studies of systematic literature reviews and health economic modeling highlighted their ability to identify strengths and gaps in reporting. Limitations. While the ELEVATE AI LLMs framework provides robust guidance, its broader generalizability and applicability to diverse HEOR tasks require further empirical testing. Additionally, several metrics adapted from computer science need further validation in HEOR contexts. Conclusion. The ELEVATE AI LLMs framework and checklist fill a critical gap in HEOR by offering structured guidance for evaluating LLM-assisted research. By promoting transparency, accuracy, and reproducibility, they aim to standardize and improve the integration of LLMs into HEOR, ensuring their outputs meet the field's rigorous standards.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important for machine learning applications. However, it can be challenging to align LLMs with our intent, particularly when we want to generate content that is preferable over others or when we want the LLM to respond in a certain style or tone that is hard to describe. To address this challenge, we propose an approach that uses contrastive examples to better describe our intent. This involves providing positive examples that illustrate the true intent, along with negative examples that show what characteristics we want LLMs to avoid. The negative examples can be retrieved from labeled data, written by a human, or generated by the LLM itself. Before generating an answer, we ask the model to analyze the examples to teach itself what to avoid. This reasoning step provides the model with the appropriate articulation of the user's need and guides it towards generting a better answer. We tested our approach on both synthesized and real-world datasets, including StackExchange and Reddit, and found that it significantly improves performance compared to standard few-shot prompting

Is explainability a false promise? This debate has emerged from the insufficient evidence that explanations aid people in situations they are introduced for. More human-centered, application-grounded evaluations of explanations are needed to settle this. Yet, with no established guidelines for such studies in NLP, researchers accustomed to standardized proxy evaluations must discover appropriate measurements, tasks, datasets, and sensible models for human-AI teams in their studies. To help with this, we first review fitting existing metrics. We then establish requirements for datasets to be suitable for application-grounded evaluations. Among over 50 datasets available for explainability research in NLP, we find that 4 meet our criteria. By finetuning Flan-T5-3B, we demonstrate the importance of reassessing the state of the art to form and study human-AI teams. Finally, we present the exemplar studies of human-AI decision-making for one of the identified suitable tasks -- verifying the correctness of a legal claim given a contract.

Honesty is a fundamental principle for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, requiring these models to recognize what they know and don't know and be able to faithfully express their knowledge. Despite promising, current LLMs still exhibit significant dishonest behaviors, such as confidently presenting wrong answers or failing to express what they know. In addition, research on the honesty of LLMs also faces challenges, including varying definitions of honesty, difficulties in distinguishing between known and unknown knowledge, and a lack of comprehensive understanding of related research. To address these issues, we provide a survey on the honesty of LLMs, covering its clarification, evaluation approaches, and strategies for improvement. Moreover, we offer insights for future research, aiming to inspire further exploration in this important area.

Despite increasingly fluent, relevant, and coherent language generation, major gaps remain between how humans and machines use language. We argue that a key dimension that is missing from our understanding of language models (LMs) is the model's ability to interpret and generate expressions of uncertainty. Whether it be the weatherperson announcing a chance of rain or a doctor giving a diagnosis, information is often not black-and-white and expressions of uncertainty provide nuance to support human-decision making. The increasing deployment of LMs in the wild motivates us to investigate whether LMs are capable of interpreting expressions of uncertainty and how LMs' behaviors change when learning to emit their own expressions of uncertainty. When injecting expressions of uncertainty into prompts (e.g., "I think the answer is..."), we discover that GPT3's generations vary upwards of 80% in accuracy based on the expression used. We analyze the linguistic characteristics of these expressions and find a drop in accuracy when naturalistic expressions of certainty are present. We find similar effects when teaching models to emit their own expressions of uncertainty, where model calibration suffers when teaching models to emit certainty rather than uncertainty. Together, these results highlight the challenges of building LMs that interpret and generate trustworthy expressions of uncertainty.

Many adversarial attacks in NLP perturb inputs to produce visually similar strings ('ergo' rightarrow 'epsilonrgo') which are legible to humans but degrade model performance. Although preserving legibility is a necessary condition for text perturbation, little work has been done to systematically characterize it; instead, legibility is typically loosely enforced via intuitions around the nature and extent of perturbations. Particularly, it is unclear to what extent can inputs be perturbed while preserving legibility, or how to quantify the legibility of a perturbed string. In this work, we address this gap by learning models that predict the legibility of a perturbed string, and rank candidate perturbations based on their legibility. To do so, we collect and release LEGIT, a human-annotated dataset comprising the legibility of visually perturbed text. Using this dataset, we build both text- and vision-based models which achieve up to 0.91 F1 score in predicting whether an input is legible, and an accuracy of 0.86 in predicting which of two given perturbations is more legible. Additionally, we discover that legible perturbations from the LEGIT dataset are more effective at lowering the performance of NLP models than best-known attack strategies, suggesting that current models may be vulnerable to a broad range of perturbations beyond what is captured by existing visual attacks. Data, code, and models are available at https://github.com/dvsth/learning-legibility-2023.

Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) systems have recently been widely researched to deal with the significant growth of the Web. NERD systems are crucial for several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as summarization, understanding, and machine translation. However, there is no standard interface specification, i.e. these systems may vary significantly either for exporting their outputs or for processing the inputs. Thus, when a given company desires to implement more than one NERD system, the process is quite exhaustive and prone to failure. In addition, industrial solutions demand critical requirements, e.g., large-scale processing, completeness, versatility, and licenses. Commonly, these requirements impose a limitation, making good NERD models to be ignored by companies. This paper presents TANKER, a distributed architecture which aims to overcome scalability, reliability and failure tolerance limitations related to industrial needs by combining NERD systems. To this end, TANKER relies on a micro-services oriented architecture, which enables agile development and delivery of complex enterprise applications. In addition, TANKER provides a standardized API which makes possible to combine several NERD systems at once.

This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and replayed on a virtual agent, in terms of synchronization with speech and believability. Interestingly, we found that training the model with two different sets of data, instead of one, did not necessarily improve its performance. The expressiveness of the people in the dataset and the shooting conditions are key elements. We also show that employing an adversarial model, in which fabricated fake examples are introduced during the training phase, increases the perception of synchronization with speech. A collection of videos demonstrating the results and code can be accessed at: https://github.com/aldelb/non_verbal_facial_animation.

Recent developments in generative AI have shone a spotlight on high-performance synthetic text generation technologies. The now wide availability and ease of use of such models highlights the urgent need to provide equally powerful technologies capable of identifying synthetic text. With this in mind, we draw inspiration from psychological studies which suggest that people can be driven by emotion and encode emotion in the text they compose. We hypothesize that pretrained language models (PLMs) have an affective deficit because they lack such an emotional driver when generating text and consequently may generate synthetic text which has affective incoherence i.e. lacking the kind of emotional coherence present in human-authored text. We subsequently develop an emotionally aware detector by fine-tuning a PLM on emotion. Experiment results indicate that our emotionally-aware detector achieves improvements across a range of synthetic text generators, various sized models, datasets, and domains. Finally, we compare our emotionally-aware synthetic text detector to ChatGPT in the task of identification of its own output and show substantial gains, reinforcing the potential of emotion as a signal to identify synthetic text. Code, models, and datasets are available at https: //github.com/alanagiasi/emoPLMsynth

Motivated by ethical and legal concerns, the scientific community is actively developing methods to limit the misuse of Text-to-Image diffusion models for reproducing copyrighted, violent, explicit, or personal information in the generated images. Simultaneously, researchers put these newly developed safety measures to the test by assuming the role of an adversary to find vulnerabilities and backdoors in them. We use compositional property of diffusion models, which allows to leverage multiple prompts in a single image generation. This property allows us to combine other concepts, that should not have been affected by the inhibition, to reconstruct the vector, responsible for target concept generation, even though the direct computation of this vector is no longer accessible. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence why the proposed attacks are possible and discuss the implications of these findings for safe model deployment. We argue that it is essential to consider all possible approaches to image generation with diffusion models that can be employed by an adversary. Our work opens up the discussion about the implications of concept arithmetics and compositional inference for safety mechanisms in diffusion models. Content Advisory: This paper contains discussions and model-generated content that may be considered offensive. Reader discretion is advised. Project page: https://cs-people.bu.edu/vpetsiuk/arc

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing several areas of Artificial Intelligence. One of the most remarkable applications is creative writing, e.g., poetry or storytelling: the generated outputs are often of astonishing quality. However, a natural question arises: can LLMs be really considered creative? In this article we firstly analyze the development of LLMs under the lens of creativity theories, investigating the key open questions and challenges. In particular, we focus our discussion around the dimensions of value, novelty and surprise as proposed by Margaret Boden in her work. Then, we consider different classic perspectives, namely product, process, press and person. We discuss a set of ``easy'' and ``hard'' problems in machine creativity, presenting them in relation to LLMs. Finally, we examine the societal impact of these technologies with a particular focus on the creative industries, analyzing the opportunities offered by them, the challenges arising by them and the potential associated risks, from both legal and ethical points of view.

Plenty of existing work has analyzed the abilities of the transformer architecture by describing its representational capacity with formal models of computation. However, the focus so far has been on analyzing the architecture in terms of language acceptance. We contend that this is an ill-suited problem in the study of language models (LMs), which are definitionally probability distributions over strings. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between transformer LMs and n-gram LMs, a simple and historically relevant class of language models. We show that transformer LMs using the hard or sparse attention mechanisms can exactly represent any n-gram LM, giving us a concrete lower bound on their probabilistic representational capacity. This provides a first step towards understanding the mechanisms that transformer LMs can use to represent probability distributions over strings.

We extend Textual Inversion to learn pseudo-words that represent a concept at different resolutions. This allows us to generate images that use the concept with different levels of detail and also to manipulate different resolutions using language. Once learned, the user can generate images at different levels of agreement to the original concept; "A photo of S^*(0)" produces the exact object while the prompt "A photo of S^*(0.8)" only matches the rough outlines and colors. Our framework allows us to generate images that use different resolutions of an image (e.g. details, textures, styles) as separate pseudo-words that can be composed in various ways. We open-soure our code in the following URL: https://github.com/giannisdaras/multires_textual_inversion

This paper provides a primer on Large Language Models (LLMs) and identifies their strengths, limitations, applications and research directions. It is intended to be useful to those in academia and industry who are interested in gaining an understanding of the key LLM concepts and technologies, and in utilising this knowledge in both day to day tasks and in more complex scenarios where this technology can enhance current practices and processes.

This document presents a detailed description of the challenge on clarifying questions for dialogue systems (ClariQ). The challenge is organized as part of the Conversational AI challenge series (ConvAI3) at Search Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) EMNLP workshop in 2020. The main aim of the conversational systems is to return an appropriate answer in response to the user requests. However, some user requests might be ambiguous. In IR settings such a situation is handled mainly thought the diversification of the search result page. It is however much more challenging in dialogue settings with limited bandwidth. Therefore, in this challenge, we provide a common evaluation framework to evaluate mixed-initiative conversations. Participants are asked to rank clarifying questions in an information-seeking conversations. The challenge is organized in two stages where in Stage 1 we evaluate the submissions in an offline setting and single-turn conversations. Top participants of Stage 1 get the chance to have their model tested by human annotators.

This paper presents a case study on the design, administration, post-processing, and evaluation of surveys on large language models (LLMs). It comprises two components: (1) A statistical method for eliciting beliefs encoded in LLMs. We introduce statistical measures and evaluation metrics that quantify the probability of an LLM "making a choice", the associated uncertainty, and the consistency of that choice. (2) We apply this method to study what moral beliefs are encoded in different LLMs, especially in ambiguous cases where the right choice is not obvious. We design a large-scale survey comprising 680 high-ambiguity moral scenarios (e.g., "Should I tell a white lie?") and 687 low-ambiguity moral scenarios (e.g., "Should I stop for a pedestrian on the road?"). Each scenario includes a description, two possible actions, and auxiliary labels indicating violated rules (e.g., "do not kill"). We administer the survey to 28 open- and closed-source LLMs. We find that (a) in unambiguous scenarios, most models "choose" actions that align with commonsense. In ambiguous cases, most models express uncertainty. (b) Some models are uncertain about choosing the commonsense action because their responses are sensitive to the question-wording. (c) Some models reflect clear preferences in ambiguous scenarios. Specifically, closed-source models tend to agree with each other.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often described as being instances of foundation models - that is, models that transfer strongly across various tasks and conditions in few-show or zero-shot manner, while exhibiting scaling laws that predict function improvement when increasing the pre-training scale. These claims of excelling in different functions and tasks rely on measurements taken across various sets of standardized benchmarks showing high scores for such models. We demonstrate here a dramatic breakdown of function and reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art models trained at the largest available scales which claim strong function, using a simple, short, conventional common sense problem formulated in concise natural language, easily solvable by humans. The breakdown is dramatic, as models also express strong overconfidence in their wrong solutions, while providing often non-sensical "reasoning"-like explanations akin to confabulations to justify and backup the validity of their clearly failed responses, making them sound plausible. Various standard interventions in an attempt to get the right solution, like various type of enhanced prompting, or urging the models to reconsider the wrong solutions again by multi step re-evaluation, fail. We take these initial observations to the scientific and technological community to stimulate urgent re-assessment of the claimed capabilities of current generation of LLMs, Such re-assessment also requires common action to create standardized benchmarks that would allow proper detection of such basic reasoning deficits that obviously manage to remain undiscovered by current state-of-the-art evaluation procedures and benchmarks. Code for reproducing experiments in the paper and raw experiments data can be found at https://github.com/LAION-AI/AIW

Length extrapolation has attracted considerable attention recently since it allows transformers to be tested on longer sequences than those used in training. Previous research has shown that this property can be attained by using carefully designed Relative Positional Encodings (RPEs). While these methods perform well on a variety of corpora, the conditions for length extrapolation have yet to be investigated. This paper attempts to determine what types of RPEs allow for length extrapolation through a thorough mathematical and empirical analysis. We discover that a transformer is certain to possess this property as long as the series that corresponds to the RPE's exponential converges. Two practices are derived from the conditions and examined in language modeling tasks on a variety of corpora. As a bonus from the conditions, we derive a new Theoretical Receptive Field (TRF) to measure the receptive field of RPEs without taking any training steps. Extensive experiments are conducted on the Wikitext-103, Books, Github, and WikiBook datasets to demonstrate the viability of our discovered conditions. We also compare TRF to Empirical Receptive Field (ERF) across different models, showing consistently matched trends on the aforementioned datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/Rpe.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as pivotal contributors in contemporary natural language processing and are increasingly being applied across a diverse range of industries. However, these large-scale probabilistic statistical models cannot currently ensure the requisite quality in professional content generation. These models often produce hallucinated text, compromising their practical utility in professional contexts. To assess the authentic reliability of LLMs in text generation, numerous initiatives have developed benchmark evaluations for hallucination phenomena. Nevertheless, these benchmarks frequently utilize constrained generation techniques due to cost and temporal constraints. These techniques encompass the use of directed hallucination induction and strategies that deliberately alter authentic text to produce hallucinations. These approaches are not congruent with the unrestricted text generation demanded by real-world applications. Furthermore, a well-established Chinese-language dataset dedicated to the evaluation of hallucinations in text generation is presently lacking. Consequently, we have developed an Unconstrained Hallucination Generation Evaluation (UHGEval) benchmark, designed to compile outputs produced with minimal restrictions by LLMs. Concurrently, we have established a comprehensive benchmark evaluation framework to aid subsequent researchers in undertaking scalable and reproducible experiments. We have also executed extensive experiments, evaluating prominent Chinese language models and the GPT series models to derive professional performance insights regarding hallucination challenges.

This study compares the performance of AI-generated and human-written product descriptions using a multifaceted evaluation model. We analyze descriptions for 100 products generated by four AI models (Gemma 2B, LLAMA, GPT2, and ChatGPT 4) with and without sample descriptions, against human-written descriptions. Our evaluation metrics include sentiment, readability, persuasiveness, Search Engine Optimization(SEO), clarity, emotional appeal, and call-to-action effectiveness. The results indicate that ChatGPT 4 performs the best. In contrast, other models demonstrate significant shortcomings, producing incoherent and illogical output that lacks logical structure and contextual relevance. These models struggle to maintain focus on the product being described, resulting in disjointed sentences that do not convey meaningful information. This research provides insights into the current capabilities and limitations of AI in the creation of content for e-Commerce.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at https://github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in their ability to write human-like text, a key challenge remains around their tendency to hallucinate generating content that appears factual but is ungrounded. This issue of hallucination is arguably the biggest hindrance to safely deploying these powerful LLMs into real-world production systems that impact people's lives. The journey toward widespread adoption of LLMs in practical settings heavily relies on addressing and mitigating hallucinations. Unlike traditional AI systems focused on limited tasks, LLMs have been exposed to vast amounts of online text data during training. While this allows them to display impressive language fluency, it also means they are capable of extrapolating information from the biases in training data, misinterpreting ambiguous prompts, or modifying the information to align superficially with the input. This becomes hugely alarming when we rely on language generation capabilities for sensitive applications, such as summarizing medical records, financial analysis reports, etc. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of over 32 techniques developed to mitigate hallucination in LLMs. Notable among these are Retrieval Augmented Generation (Lewis et al, 2021), Knowledge Retrieval (Varshney et al,2023), CoNLI (Lei et al, 2023), and CoVe (Dhuliawala et al, 2023). Furthermore, we introduce a detailed taxonomy categorizing these methods based on various parameters, such as dataset utilization, common tasks, feedback mechanisms, and retriever types. This classification helps distinguish the diverse approaches specifically designed to tackle hallucination issues in LLMs. Additionally, we analyze the challenges and limitations inherent in these techniques, providing a solid foundation for future research in addressing hallucinations and related phenomena within the realm of LLMs.

Recent work has raised concerns about the inherent limitations of text-only pretraining. In this paper, we first demonstrate that reporting bias, the tendency of people to not state the obvious, is one of the causes of this limitation, and then investigate to what extent multimodal training can mitigate this issue. To accomplish this, we 1) generate the Color Dataset (CoDa), a dataset of human-perceived color distributions for 521 common objects; 2) use CoDa to analyze and compare the color distribution found in text, the distribution captured by language models, and a human's perception of color; and 3) investigate the performance differences between text-only and multimodal models on CoDa. Our results show that the distribution of colors that a language model recovers correlates more strongly with the inaccurate distribution found in text than with the ground-truth, supporting the claim that reporting bias negatively impacts and inherently limits text-only training. We then demonstrate that multimodal models can leverage their visual training to mitigate these effects, providing a promising avenue for future research.

Advances in large language models (LLMs) have empowered a variety of applications. However, there is still a significant gap in research when it comes to understanding and enhancing the capabilities of LLMs in the field of mental health. In this work, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of multiple LLMs, including Alpaca, Alpaca-LoRA, FLAN-T5, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, on various mental health prediction tasks via online text data. We conduct a broad range of experiments, covering zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and instruction fine-tuning. The results indicate a promising yet limited performance of LLMs with zero-shot and few-shot prompt designs for the mental health tasks. More importantly, our experiments show that instruction finetuning can significantly boost the performance of LLMs for all tasks simultaneously. Our best-finetuned models, Mental-Alpaca and Mental-FLAN-T5, outperform the best prompt design of GPT-3.5 (25 and 15 times bigger) by 10.9% on balanced accuracy and the best of GPT-4 (250 and 150 times bigger) by 4.8%. They further perform on par with the state-of-the-art task-specific language model. We also conduct an exploratory case study on LLMs' capability on the mental health reasoning tasks, illustrating the promising capability of certain models such as GPT-4. We summarize our findings into a set of action guidelines for potential methods to enhance LLMs' capability for mental health tasks. Meanwhile, we also emphasize the important limitations before achieving deployability in real-world mental health settings, such as known racial and gender bias. We highlight the important ethical risks accompanying this line of research.

A simple communication complexity argument proves that no one-layer transformer can solve the induction heads task unless its size is exponentially larger than the size sufficient for a two-layer transformer.

Recent breakthroughs in large language modeling have facilitated rigorous exploration of their application in diverse tasks related to tabular data modeling, such as prediction, tabular data synthesis, question answering, and table understanding. Each task presents unique challenges and opportunities. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive review that summarizes and compares the key techniques, metrics, datasets, models, and optimization approaches in this research domain. This survey aims to address this gap by consolidating recent progress in these areas, offering a thorough survey and taxonomy of the datasets, metrics, and methodologies utilized. It identifies strengths, limitations, unexplored territories, and gaps in the existing literature, while providing some insights for future research directions in this vital and rapidly evolving field. It also provides relevant code and datasets references. Through this comprehensive review, we hope to provide interested readers with pertinent references and insightful perspectives, empowering them with the necessary tools and knowledge to effectively navigate and address the prevailing challenges in the field.

In this paper, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the pre-training of music. While the prevalent use of MIDI in music modeling is well-established, our findings suggest that LLMs are inherently more compatible with ABC Notation, which aligns more closely with their design and strengths, thereby enhancing the model's performance in musical composition. To address the challenges associated with misaligned measures from different tracks during generation, we propose the development of a Synchronized Multi-Track ABC Notation (SMT-ABC Notation), which aims to preserve coherence across multiple musical tracks. Our contributions include a series of models capable of handling up to 8192 tokens, covering 90\% of the symbolic music data in our training set. Furthermore, we explore the implications of the Symbolic Music Scaling Law (SMS Law) on model performance. The results indicate a promising direction for future research in music generation, offering extensive resources for community-led research through our open-source contributions.

We evaluated GPT-4 in a public online Turing Test. The best-performing GPT-4 prompt passed in 41% of games, outperforming baselines set by ELIZA (27%) and GPT-3.5 (14%), but falling short of chance and the baseline set by human participants (63%). Participants' decisions were based mainly on linguistic style (35%) and socio-emotional traits (27%), supporting the idea that intelligence is not sufficient to pass the Turing Test. Participants' demographics, including education and familiarity with LLMs, did not predict detection rate, suggesting that even those who understand systems deeply and interact with them frequently may be susceptible to deception. Despite known limitations as a test of intelligence, we argue that the Turing Test continues to be relevant as an assessment of naturalistic communication and deception. AI models with the ability to masquerade as humans could have widespread societal consequences, and we analyse the effectiveness of different strategies and criteria for judging humanlikeness.

A long-term goal of machine learning is to build intelligent conversational agents. One recent popular approach is to train end-to-end models on a large amount of real dialog transcripts between humans (Sordoni et al., 2015; Vinyals & Le, 2015; Shang et al., 2015). However, this approach leaves many questions unanswered as an understanding of the precise successes and shortcomings of each model is hard to assess. A contrasting recent proposal are the bAbI tasks (Weston et al., 2015b) which are synthetic data that measure the ability of learning machines at various reasoning tasks over toy language. Unfortunately, those tests are very small and hence may encourage methods that do not scale. In this work, we propose a suite of new tasks of a much larger scale that attempt to bridge the gap between the two regimes. Choosing the domain of movies, we provide tasks that test the ability of models to answer factual questions (utilizing OMDB), provide personalization (utilizing MovieLens), carry short conversations about the two, and finally to perform on natural dialogs from Reddit. We provide a dataset covering 75k movie entities and with 3.5M training examples. We present results of various models on these tasks, and evaluate their performance.

Building on the success of large language models (LLMs), recent advancements such as GPT-4o have enabled real-time speech interactions through LLM-based voice assistants, offering a significantly improved user experience compared to traditional text-based interactions. However, the absence of benchmarks designed to evaluate these speech interaction capabilities has hindered progress of LLM-based voice assistants development. Current evaluations focus primarily on automatic speech recognition (ASR) or general knowledge evaluation with clean speeches, neglecting the more intricate, real-world scenarios that involve diverse speaker characteristics, environmental and content factors. To address this, we introduce VoiceBench, the first benchmark designed to provide a multi-faceted evaluation of LLM-based voice assistants. VoiceBench also includes both real and synthetic spoken instructions that incorporate the above three key real-world variations. Extensive experiments reveal the limitations of current LLM-based voice assistant models and offer valuable insights for future research and development in this field.

Understanding sentence meanings and updating information states appropriately across time -- what we call "situational understanding" (SU) -- is a critical ability for human-like AI agents. SU is essential in particular for chat models, such as ChatGPT, to enable consistent, coherent, and effective dialogue between humans and AI. Previous works have identified certain SU limitations in non-chatbot Large Language models (LLMs), but the extent and causes of these limitations are not well understood, and capabilities of current chat-based models in this domain have not been explored. In this work we tackle these questions, proposing a novel synthetic environment for SU testing which allows us to do controlled and systematic testing of SU in chat-oriented models, through assessment of models' ability to track and enumerate environment states. Our environment also allows for close analysis of dynamics of model performance, to better understand underlying causes for performance patterns. We apply our test to ChatGPT, the state-of-the-art chatbot, and find that despite the fundamental simplicity of the task, the model's performance reflects an inability to retain correct environment states across time. Our follow-up analyses suggest that performance degradation is largely because ChatGPT has non-persistent in-context memory (although it can access the full dialogue history) and it is susceptible to hallucinated updates -- including updates that artificially inflate accuracies. Our findings suggest overall that ChatGPT is not currently equipped for robust tracking of situation states, and that trust in the impressive dialogue performance of ChatGPT comes with risks. We release the codebase for reproducing our test environment, as well as all prompts and API responses from ChatGPT, at https://github.com/yangalan123/SituationalTesting.

The rapid advancements in the development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have consistently led to new breakthroughs on various benchmarks. In response, numerous challenging and comprehensive benchmarks have been proposed to more accurately assess the capabilities of MLLMs. However, there is a dearth of exploration of the higher-order perceptual capabilities of MLLMs. To fill this gap, we propose the Image Implication understanding Benchmark, II-Bench, which aims to evaluate the model's higher-order perception of images. Through extensive experiments on II-Bench across multiple MLLMs, we have made significant findings. Initially, a substantial gap is observed between the performance of MLLMs and humans on II-Bench. The pinnacle accuracy of MLLMs attains 74.8%, whereas human accuracy averages 90%, peaking at an impressive 98%. Subsequently, MLLMs perform worse on abstract and complex images, suggesting limitations in their ability to understand high-level semantics and capture image details. Finally, it is observed that most models exhibit enhanced accuracy when image sentiment polarity hints are incorporated into the prompts. This observation underscores a notable deficiency in their inherent understanding of image sentiment. We believe that II-Bench will inspire the community to develop the next generation of MLLMs, advancing the journey towards expert artificial general intelligence (AGI). II-Bench is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/m-a-p/II-Bench.

Hate speech is a harmful form of online expression, often manifesting as derogatory posts. It is a significant risk in digital environments. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is concern about their potential to replicate hate speech patterns, given their training on vast amounts of unmoderated internet data. Understanding how LLMs respond to hate speech is crucial for their responsible deployment. However, the behaviour of LLMs towards hate speech has been limited compared. This paper investigates the reactions of seven state-of-the-art LLMs (LLaMA 2, Vicuna, LLaMA 3, Mistral, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Gemini Pro) to hate speech. Through qualitative analysis, we aim to reveal the spectrum of responses these models produce, highlighting their capacity to handle hate speech inputs. We also discuss strategies to mitigate hate speech generation by LLMs, particularly through fine-tuning and guideline guardrailing. Finally, we explore the models' responses to hate speech framed in politically correct language.

In many contexts, lying -- the use of verbal falsehoods to deceive -- is harmful. While lying has traditionally been a human affair, AI systems that make sophisticated verbal statements are becoming increasingly prevalent. This raises the question of how we should limit the harm caused by AI "lies" (i.e. falsehoods that are actively selected for). Human truthfulness is governed by social norms and by laws (against defamation, perjury, and fraud). Differences between AI and humans present an opportunity to have more precise standards of truthfulness for AI, and to have these standards rise over time. This could provide significant benefits to public epistemics and the economy, and mitigate risks of worst-case AI futures. Establishing norms or laws of AI truthfulness will require significant work to: (1) identify clear truthfulness standards; (2) create institutions that can judge adherence to those standards; and (3) develop AI systems that are robustly truthful. Our initial proposals for these areas include: (1) a standard of avoiding "negligent falsehoods" (a generalisation of lies that is easier to assess); (2) institutions to evaluate AI systems before and after real-world deployment; and (3) explicitly training AI systems to be truthful via curated datasets and human interaction. A concerning possibility is that evaluation mechanisms for eventual truthfulness standards could be captured by political interests, leading to harmful censorship and propaganda. Avoiding this might take careful attention. And since the scale of AI speech acts might grow dramatically over the coming decades, early truthfulness standards might be particularly important because of the precedents they set.

State-of-the-art machine learning methods exhibit limited compositional generalization. At the same time, there is a lack of realistic benchmarks that comprehensively measure this ability, which makes it challenging to find and evaluate improvements. We introduce a novel method to systematically construct such benchmarks by maximizing compound divergence while guaranteeing a small atom divergence between train and test sets, and we quantitatively compare this method to other approaches for creating compositional generalization benchmarks. We present a large and realistic natural language question answering dataset that is constructed according to this method, and we use it to analyze the compositional generalization ability of three machine learning architectures. We find that they fail to generalize compositionally and that there is a surprisingly strong negative correlation between compound divergence and accuracy. We also demonstrate how our method can be used to create new compositionality benchmarks on top of the existing SCAN dataset, which confirms these findings.

Despite regulations imposed by nations and social media platforms, such as recent EU regulations targeting digital violence, abusive content persists as a significant challenge. Existing approaches primarily rely on binary solutions, such as outright blocking or banning, yet fail to address the complex nature of abusive speech. In this work, we propose a more comprehensive approach called Demarcation scoring abusive speech based on four aspect -- (i) severity scale; (ii) presence of a target; (iii) context scale; (iv) legal scale -- and suggesting more options of actions like detoxification, counter speech generation, blocking, or, as a final measure, human intervention. Through a thorough analysis of abusive speech regulations across diverse jurisdictions, platforms, and research papers we highlight the gap in preventing measures and advocate for tailored proactive steps to combat its multifaceted manifestations. Our work aims to inform future strategies for effectively addressing abusive speech online.

Conversational large language models are fine-tuned for both instruction-following and safety, resulting in models that obey benign requests but refuse harmful ones. While this refusal behavior is widespread across chat models, its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we show that refusal is mediated by a one-dimensional subspace, across 13 popular open-source chat models up to 72B parameters in size. Specifically, for each model, we find a single direction such that erasing this direction from the model's residual stream activations prevents it from refusing harmful instructions, while adding this direction elicits refusal on even harmless instructions. Leveraging this insight, we propose a novel white-box jailbreak method that surgically disables refusal with minimal effect on other capabilities. Finally, we mechanistically analyze how adversarial suffixes suppress propagation of the refusal-mediating direction. Our findings underscore the brittleness of current safety fine-tuning methods. More broadly, our work showcases how an understanding of model internals can be leveraged to develop practical methods for controlling model behavior.

In this era of technological advancements, several cutting-edge techniques are being implemented to enhance Autonomous Driving (AD) systems, focusing on improving safety, efficiency, and adaptability in complex driving environments. However, AD still faces some problems including performance limitations. To address this problem, we conducted an in-depth study on implementing the Multi-modal Large Language Model. We constructed a Virtual Question Answering (VQA) dataset to fine-tune the model and address problems with the poor performance of MLLM on AD. We then break down the AD decision-making process by scene understanding, prediction, and decision-making. Chain of Thought has been used to make the decision more perfectly. Our experiments and detailed analysis of Autonomous Driving give an idea of how important MLLM is for AD.

In the realm of media technology, digital humans have gained prominence due to rapid advancements in computer technology. However, the manual modeling and control required for the majority of digital humans pose significant obstacles to efficient development. The speech-driven methods offer a novel avenue for manipulating the mouth shape and expressions of digital humans. Despite the proliferation of driving methods, the quality of many generated talking head (TH) videos remains a concern, impacting user visual experiences. To tackle this issue, this paper introduces the Talking Head Quality Assessment (THQA) database, featuring 800 TH videos generated through 8 diverse speech-driven methods. Extensive experiments affirm the THQA database's richness in character and speech features. Subsequent subjective quality assessment experiments analyze correlations between scoring results and speech-driven methods, ages, and genders. In addition, experimental results show that mainstream image and video quality assessment methods have limitations for the THQA database, underscoring the imperative for further research to enhance TH video quality assessment. The THQA database is publicly accessible at https://github.com/zyj-2000/THQA.

One way to increase confidence in the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to support them with reasoning that is clear and easy to check -- a property we call legibility. We study legibility in the context of solving grade-school math problems and show that optimizing chain-of-thought solutions only for answer correctness can make them less legible. To mitigate the loss in legibility, we propose a training algorithm inspired by Prover-Verifier Game from Anil et al. (2021). Our algorithm iteratively trains small verifiers to predict solution correctness, "helpful" provers to produce correct solutions that the verifier accepts, and "sneaky" provers to produce incorrect solutions that fool the verifier. We find that the helpful prover's accuracy and the verifier's robustness to adversarial attacks increase over the course of training. Furthermore, we show that legibility training transfers to time-constrained humans tasked with verifying solution correctness. Over course of LLM training human accuracy increases when checking the helpful prover's solutions, and decreases when checking the sneaky prover's solutions. Hence, training for checkability by small verifiers is a plausible technique for increasing output legibility. Our results suggest legibility training against small verifiers as a practical avenue for increasing legibility of large LLMs to humans, and thus could help with alignment of superhuman models.

Recent advancements in natural language processing, especially the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), have opened exciting possibilities for constructing computational simulations designed to replicate human behavior accurately. However, LLMs are complex statistical learners without straightforward deductive rules, making them prone to unexpected behaviors. In this study, we highlight the limitations of LLMs in simulating human interactions, particularly focusing on LLMs' ability to simulate political debates. Our findings indicate a tendency for LLM agents to conform to the model's inherent social biases despite being directed to debate from certain political perspectives. This tendency results in behavioral patterns that seem to deviate from well-established social dynamics among humans. We reinforce these observations using an automatic self-fine-tuning method, which enables us to manipulate the biases within the LLM and demonstrate that agents subsequently align with the altered biases. These results underscore the need for further research to develop methods that help agents overcome these biases, a critical step toward creating more realistic simulations.

Legal practice has witnessed a sharp rise in products incorporating artificial intelligence (AI). Such tools are designed to assist with a wide range of core legal tasks, from search and summarization of caselaw to document drafting. But the large language models used in these tools are prone to "hallucinate," or make up false information, making their use risky in high-stakes domains. Recently, certain legal research providers have touted methods such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as "eliminating" (Casetext, 2023) or "avoid[ing]" hallucinations (Thomson Reuters, 2023), or guaranteeing "hallucination-free" legal citations (LexisNexis, 2023). Because of the closed nature of these systems, systematically assessing these claims is challenging. In this article, we design and report on the first preregistered empirical evaluation of AI-driven legal research tools. We demonstrate that the providers' claims are overstated. While hallucinations are reduced relative to general-purpose chatbots (GPT-4), we find that the AI research tools made by LexisNexis (Lexis+ AI) and Thomson Reuters (Westlaw AI-Assisted Research and Ask Practical Law AI) each hallucinate between 17% and 33% of the time. We also document substantial differences between systems in responsiveness and accuracy. Our article makes four key contributions. It is the first to assess and report the performance of RAG-based proprietary legal AI tools. Second, it introduces a comprehensive, preregistered dataset for identifying and understanding vulnerabilities in these systems. Third, it proposes a clear typology for differentiating between hallucinations and accurate legal responses. Last, it provides evidence to inform the responsibilities of legal professionals in supervising and verifying AI outputs, which remains a central open question for the responsible integration of AI into law.

In this paper, we present a database of emotional speech intended to be open-sourced and used for synthesis and generation purpose. It contains data for male and female actors in English and a male actor in French. The database covers 5 emotion classes so it could be suitable to build synthesis and voice transformation systems with the potential to control the emotional dimension in a continuous way. We show the data's efficiency by building a simple MLP system converting neutral to angry speech style and evaluate it via a CMOS perception test. Even though the system is a very simple one, the test show the efficiency of the data which is promising for future work.

This paper introduces the "CIVICS: Culturally-Informed & Values-Inclusive Corpus for Societal impacts" dataset, designed to evaluate the social and cultural variation of Large Language Models (LLMs) across multiple languages and value-sensitive topics. We create a hand-crafted, multilingual dataset of value-laden prompts which address specific socially sensitive topics, including LGBTQI rights, social welfare, immigration, disability rights, and surrogacy. CIVICS is designed to generate responses showing LLMs' encoded and implicit values. Through our dynamic annotation processes, tailored prompt design, and experiments, we investigate how open-weight LLMs respond to value-sensitive issues, exploring their behavior across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Using two experimental set-ups based on log-probabilities and long-form responses, we show social and cultural variability across different LLMs. Specifically, experiments involving long-form responses demonstrate that refusals are triggered disparately across models, but consistently and more frequently in English or translated statements. Moreover, specific topics and sources lead to more pronounced differences across model answers, particularly on immigration, LGBTQI rights, and social welfare. As shown by our experiments, the CIVICS dataset aims to serve as a tool for future research, promoting reproducibility and transparency across broader linguistic settings, and furthering the development of AI technologies that respect and reflect global cultural diversities and value pluralism. The CIVICS dataset and tools will be made available upon publication under open licenses; an anonymized version is currently available at https://huggingface.co/CIVICS-dataset.

Large language models (LLMs) have received much attention and shown their potential in digital health, while their application in mental health is subject to ongoing debate. This systematic review aims to summarize and characterize the use of LLMs in mental health by investigating the strengths and limitations of the latest work in LLMs and discusses the challenges and opportunities for early screening, digital interventions, and other clinical applications in mental health. Following PRISMA guidelines, we examined English articles from PubMed, DBLP Computer Science Bibliography, and IEEE Xplore, published between 1 January 2017, and 1 September 2023, focusing on mental health and LLMs. The review analyzed 32 articles, including mental health analysis using social media datasets (n=13), mental health chatbots (n=10), and other mental health applications (n=9). Findings reveal LLMs' effectiveness in mental health issue detection and the enhancement of telepsychological services through personalised healthcare. Nonetheless, risks like text inconsistencies, hallucinatory content, and the lack of an ethical framework raise concerns about their clinical use. Despite these challenges, the advancement of LLMs underscores their potential as innovative clinical tools, necessitating further research and development. The review emphasizes that LLMs should complement, not replace, professional mental health services.

With adversarial or otherwise normal prompts, existing large language models (LLM) can be pushed to generate toxic discourses. One way to reduce the risk of LLMs generating undesired discourses is to alter the training of the LLM. This can be very restrictive due to demanding computation requirements. Other methods rely on rule-based or prompt-based token elimination, which are limited as they dismiss future tokens and the overall meaning of the complete discourse. Here, we center detoxification on the probability that the finished discourse is ultimately considered toxic. That is, at each point, we advise against token selections proportional to how likely a finished text from this point will be toxic. To this end, we formally extend the dead-end theory from the recent reinforcement learning (RL) literature to also cover uncertain outcomes. Our approach, called rectification, utilizes a separate but significantly smaller model for detoxification, which can be applied to diverse LLMs as long as they share the same vocabulary. Importantly, our method does not require access to the internal representations of the LLM, but only the token probability distribution at each decoding step. This is crucial as many LLMs today are hosted in servers and only accessible through APIs. When applied to various LLMs, including GPT-3, our approach significantly improves the generated discourse compared to the base LLMs and other techniques in terms of both the overall language and detoxification performance.

We present a new probing dataset named PROST: Physical Reasoning about Objects Through Space and Time. This dataset contains 18,736 multiple-choice questions made from 14 manually curated templates, covering 10 physical reasoning concepts. All questions are designed to probe both causal and masked language models in a zero-shot setting. We conduct an extensive analysis which demonstrates that state-of-the-art pretrained models are inadequate at physical reasoning: they are influenced by the order in which answer options are presented to them, they struggle when the superlative in a question is inverted (e.g., most <-> least), and increasing the amount of pretraining data and parameters only yields minimal improvements. These results provide support for the hypothesis that current pretrained models' ability to reason about physical interactions is inherently limited by a lack of real world experience. By highlighting these limitations, we hope to motivate the development of models with a human-like understanding of the physical world.

In many jurisdictions, the excessive workload of courts leads to high delays. Suitable predictive AI models can assist legal professionals in their work, and thus enhance and speed up the process. So far, Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) datasets have been released in English, French, and Chinese. We publicly release a multilingual (German, French, and Italian), diachronic (2000-2020) corpus of 85K cases from the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland (FSCS). We evaluate state-of-the-art BERT-based methods including two variants of BERT that overcome the BERT input (text) length limitation (up to 512 tokens). Hierarchical BERT has the best performance (approx. 68-70% Macro-F1-Score in German and French). Furthermore, we study how several factors (canton of origin, year of publication, text length, legal area) affect performance. We release both the benchmark dataset and our code to accelerate future research and ensure reproducibility.

Historically, sign language machine translation has been posed as a sentence-level task: datasets consisting of continuous narratives are chopped up and presented to the model as isolated clips. In this work, we explore the limitations of this task framing. First, we survey a number of linguistic phenomena in sign languages that depend on discourse-level context. Then as a case study, we perform the first human baseline for sign language translation that actually substitutes a human into the machine learning task framing, rather than provide the human with the entire document as context. This human baseline -- for ASL to English translation on the How2Sign dataset -- shows that for 33% of sentences in our sample, our fluent Deaf signer annotators were only able to understand key parts of the clip in light of additional discourse-level context. These results underscore the importance of understanding and sanity checking examples when adapting machine learning to new domains.

We investigate the phenomenon of an LLM's untruthful response using a large set of 220 handcrafted linguistic features. We focus on GPT-3 models and find that the linguistic profiles of responses are similar across model sizes. That is, how varying-sized LLMs respond to given prompts stays similar on the linguistic properties level. We expand upon this finding by training support vector machines that rely only upon the stylistic components of model responses to classify the truthfulness of statements. Though the dataset size limits our current findings, we present promising evidence that truthfulness detection is possible without evaluating the content itself.

Much recent work seeks to evaluate values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) using multiple-choice surveys and questionnaires. Most of this work is motivated by concerns around real-world LLM applications. For example, politically-biased LLMs may subtly influence society when they are used by millions of people. Such real-world concerns, however, stand in stark contrast to the artificiality of current evaluations: real users do not typically ask LLMs survey questions. Motivated by this discrepancy, we challenge the prevailing constrained evaluation paradigm for values and opinions in LLMs and explore more realistic unconstrained evaluations. As a case study, we focus on the popular Political Compass Test (PCT). In a systematic review, we find that most prior work using the PCT forces models to comply with the PCT's multiple-choice format. We show that models give substantively different answers when not forced; that answers change depending on how models are forced; and that answers lack paraphrase robustness. Then, we demonstrate that models give different answers yet again in a more realistic open-ended answer setting. We distill these findings into recommendations and open challenges in evaluating values and opinions in LLMs.

The current trend of scaling language models involves increasing both parameter count and training dataset size. Extrapolating this trend suggests that training dataset size may soon be limited by the amount of text data available on the internet. Motivated by this limit, we investigate scaling language models in data-constrained regimes. Specifically, we run a large set of experiments varying the extent of data repetition and compute budget, ranging up to 900 billion training tokens and 9 billion parameter models. We find that with constrained data for a fixed compute budget, training with up to 4 epochs of repeated data yields negligible changes to loss compared to having unique data. However, with more repetition, the value of adding compute eventually decays to zero. We propose and empirically validate a scaling law for compute optimality that accounts for the decreasing value of repeated tokens and excess parameters. Finally, we experiment with approaches mitigating data scarcity, including augmenting the training dataset with code data or removing commonly used filters. Models and datasets from our 400 training runs are publicly available at https://github.com/huggingface/datablations.

Scaling up language models has been shown to predictably improve performance and sample efficiency on a wide range of downstream tasks. This paper instead discusses an unpredictable phenomenon that we refer to as emergent abilities of large language models. We consider an ability to be emergent if it is not present in smaller models but is present in larger models. Thus, emergent abilities cannot be predicted simply by extrapolating the performance of smaller models. The existence of such emergence implies that additional scaling could further expand the range of capabilities of language models.

Transformers, central to the successes in modern Natural Language Processing, often falter on arithmetic tasks despite their vast capabilities --which paradoxically include remarkable coding abilities. We observe that a crucial challenge is their naive reliance on positional information to solve arithmetic problems with a small number of digits, leading to poor performance on larger numbers. Herein, we delve deeper into the role of positional encoding, and propose several ways to fix the issue, either by modifying the positional encoding directly, or by modifying the representation of the arithmetic task to leverage standard positional encoding differently. We investigate the value of these modifications for three tasks: (i) classical multiplication, (ii) length extrapolation in addition, and (iii) addition in natural language context. For (i) we train a small model on a small dataset (100M parameters and 300k samples) with remarkable aptitude in (direct, no scratchpad) 15 digits multiplication and essentially perfect up to 12 digits, while usual training in this context would give a model failing at 4 digits multiplication. In the experiments on addition, we use a mere 120k samples to demonstrate: for (ii) extrapolation from 10 digits to testing on 12 digits numbers while usual training would have no extrapolation, and for (iii) almost perfect accuracy up to 5 digits while usual training would be correct only up to 3 digits (which is essentially memorization with a training set of 120k samples).

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a task that enables machines to understand human language. Some tasks, such as stance detection and sentiment analysis, are closely related to individual subjective perspectives, thus termed individual-level NLU. Previously, these tasks are often simplified to text-level NLU tasks, ignoring individual factors. This not only makes inference difficult and unexplainable but often results in a large number of label errors when creating datasets. To address the above limitations, we propose a new NLU annotation guideline based on individual-level factors. Specifically, we incorporate other posts by the same individual and then annotate individual subjective perspectives after considering all individual posts. We use this guideline to expand and re-annotate the stance detection and topic-based sentiment analysis datasets. We find that error rates in the samples were as high as 31.7\% and 23.3\%. We further use large language models to conduct experiments on the re-annotation datasets and find that the large language models perform well on both datasets after adding individual factors. Both GPT-4o and Llama3-70B can achieve an accuracy greater than 87\% on the re-annotation datasets. We also verify the effectiveness of individual factors through ablation studies. We call on future researchers to add individual factors when creating such datasets. Our re-annotation dataset can be found at https://github.com/24yearsoldstudent/Individual-NLU

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), building upon the foundation of powerful large language models (LLMs), have recently demonstrated exceptional capabilities in generating not only texts but also images given interleaved multimodal inputs (acting like a combination of GPT-4V and DALL-E 3). However, existing MLLM benchmarks remain limited to assessing only models' comprehension ability of single image-text inputs, failing to keep up with the strides made in MLLMs. A comprehensive benchmark is imperative for investigating the progress and uncovering the limitations of current MLLMs. In this work, we categorize the capabilities of MLLMs into hierarchical levels from L_0 to L_4 based on the modalities they can accept and generate, and propose SEED-Bench-2, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the hierarchical capabilities of MLLMs. Specifically, SEED-Bench-2 comprises 24K multiple-choice questions with accurate human annotations, which spans 27 dimensions, including the evaluation of both text and image generation. Multiple-choice questions with groundtruth options derived from human annotation enables an objective and efficient assessment of model performance, eliminating the need for human or GPT intervention during evaluation. We further evaluate the performance of 23 prominent open-source MLLMs and summarize valuable observations. By revealing the limitations of existing MLLMs through extensive evaluations, we aim for SEED-Bench-2 to provide insights that will motivate future research towards the goal of General Artificial Intelligence. Dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/AILab-CVC/SEED-Bench

Sentiment analysis that classifies data into positive or negative has been dominantly used to recognize emotional aspects of texts, despite the deficit of thorough examination of emotional meanings. Recently, corpora labeled with more than just valence are built to exceed this limit. However, most Korean emotion corpora are small in the number of instances and cover a limited range of emotions. We introduce KOTE dataset. KOTE contains 50k (250k cases) Korean online comments, each of which is manually labeled for 43 emotion labels or one special label (NO EMOTION) by crowdsourcing (Ps = 3,048). The emotion taxonomy of the 43 emotions is systematically established by cluster analysis of Korean emotion concepts expressed on word embedding space. After explaining how KOTE is developed, we also discuss the results of finetuning and analysis for social discrimination in the corpus.

We introduce MathWriting, the largest online handwritten mathematical expression dataset to date. It consists of 230k human-written samples and an additional 400k synthetic ones. MathWriting can also be used for offline HME recognition and is larger than all existing offline HME datasets like IM2LATEX-100K. We introduce a benchmark based on MathWriting data in order to advance research on both online and offline HME recognition.

The training data for many Large Language Models (LLMs) is contaminated with test data. This means that public benchmarks used to assess LLMs are compromised, suggesting a performance gap between benchmark scores and actual capabilities. Ideally, a private holdout set could be used to accurately verify scores. Unfortunately, such datasets do not exist for most benchmarks, and post-hoc construction of sufficiently similar datasets is non-trivial. To address these issues, we introduce a systematic methodology for (i) retrospectively constructing a holdout dataset for a target dataset, (ii) demonstrating the statistical indistinguishability of this retro-holdout dataset, and (iii) comparing LLMs on the two datasets to quantify the performance gap due to the dataset's public availability. Applying these methods to TruthfulQA, we construct and release Retro-Misconceptions, on which we evaluate twenty LLMs and find that some have inflated scores by as much as 16 percentage points. Our results demonstrate that public benchmark scores do not always accurately assess model properties, and underscore the importance of improved data practices in the field.

Optical Music Recognition is a field that has progressed significantly, bringing accurate systems that transcribe effectively music scores into digital formats. Despite this, there are still several limitations that hinder OMR from achieving its full potential. Specifically, state of the art OMR still depends on multi-stage pipelines for performing full-page transcription, as well as it has only been demonstrated in monophonic cases, leaving behind very relevant engravings. In this work, we present the Sheet Music Transformer++, an end-to-end model that is able to transcribe full-page polyphonic music scores without the need of a previous Layout Analysis step. This is done thanks to an extensive curriculum learning-based pretraining with synthetic data generation. We conduct several experiments on a full-page extension of a public polyphonic transcription dataset. The experimental outcomes confirm that the model is competent at transcribing full-page pianoform scores, marking a noteworthy milestone in end-to-end OMR transcription.

With the rapid development of Large language models (LLMs), understanding the capabilities of LLMs in identifying unsafe content has become increasingly important. While previous works have introduced several benchmarks to evaluate the safety risk of LLMs, the community still has a limited understanding of current LLMs' capability to recognize illegal and unsafe content in Chinese contexts. In this work, we present a Chinese safety benchmark (ChineseSafe) to facilitate research on the content safety of large language models. To align with the regulations for Chinese Internet content moderation, our ChineseSafe contains 205,034 examples across 4 classes and 10 sub-classes of safety issues. For Chinese contexts, we add several special types of illegal content: political sensitivity, pornography, and variant/homophonic words. Moreover, we employ two methods to evaluate the legal risks of popular LLMs, including open-sourced models and APIs. The results reveal that many LLMs exhibit vulnerability to certain types of safety issues, leading to legal risks in China. Our work provides a guideline for developers and researchers to facilitate the safety of LLMs. Our results are also available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/SUSTech/ChineseSafe-Benchmark.

Recent language models have a mysterious tendency to generate false but plausible-sounding text. Such "hallucinations" are an obstacle to the usability of language-based AI systems and can harm people who rely upon their outputs. This work shows shows that there is an inherent statistical reason that pretrained language models hallucinate certain types of facts, having nothing to do with the transformer LM architecture or data quality. For "arbitrary" facts whose veracity cannot be determined from the training data, we show that hallucination is necessary for language models that satisfy a statistical calibration condition appropriate for generative language models. Specifically, if the maximum probability of any fact is bounded, we show that the probability of generating a hallucination is close to the fraction of facts that occur exactly once in the training data (a "Good-Turing" estimate), even assuming ideal training data without errors. One conclusion is that models pretrained to be sufficiently good predictors (i.e., calibrated) may require post-training to mitigate hallucinations on the type of arbitrary facts that tend to appear once in the training set. However, our analysis also suggests that there is no statistical reason that pretraining will lead to hallucination on facts that tend to appear more than once in the training data (like references to publications such as articles and books, whose hallucinations have been particularly notable and problematic) or on systematic facts (like arithmetic calculations). Therefore, different architectures and learning algorithms may mitigate these latter types of hallucinations.

In the last decade, several organizations have produced documents intended to standardize, in the normative sense, and promote guidance to our recent and rapid AI development. However, the full spectrum of ideas presented in these documents has not yet been analyzed, except for a few meta-analyses and critical reviews of the field. In this work, we seek to expand on the work done by past researchers and create a tool for better data visualization of the contents and nature of these documents, to understand whether there is consensus or similarity between the principles espoused by various institutions, which may inspire debates on future regulations. We also provide some preliminary thoughts and questions that could guide the continuity of the research through a critical analysis of the results acquired by our methodology into a sample size of 200 documents.

When experiencing an information need, users want to engage with a domain expert, but often turn to an information retrieval system, such as a search engine, instead. Classical information retrieval systems do not answer information needs directly, but instead provide references to (hopefully authoritative) answers. Successful question answering systems offer a limited corpus created on-demand by human experts, which is neither timely nor scalable. Pre-trained language models, by contrast, are capable of directly generating prose that may be responsive to an information need, but at present they are dilettantes rather than domain experts -- they do not have a true understanding of the world, they are prone to hallucinating, and crucially they are incapable of justifying their utterances by referring to supporting documents in the corpus they were trained over. This paper examines how ideas from classical information retrieval and pre-trained language models can be synthesized and evolved into systems that truly deliver on the promise of domain expert advice.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as an integral part of modern societies, powering user-facing applications such as personal assistants and enterprise applications like recruitment tools. Despite their utility, research indicates that LLMs perpetuate systemic biases. Yet, prior works on LLM harms predominantly focus on Western concepts like race and gender, often overlooking cultural concepts from other parts of the world. Additionally, these studies typically investigate "harm" as a singular dimension, ignoring the various and subtle forms in which harms manifest. To address this gap, we introduce the Covert Harms and Social Threats (CHAST), a set of seven metrics grounded in social science literature. We utilize evaluation models aligned with human assessments to examine the presence of covert harms in LLM-generated conversations, particularly in the context of recruitment. Our experiments reveal that seven out of the eight LLMs included in this study generated conversations riddled with CHAST, characterized by malign views expressed in seemingly neutral language unlikely to be detected by existing methods. Notably, these LLMs manifested more extreme views and opinions when dealing with non-Western concepts like caste, compared to Western ones such as race.

On-device automatic speech recognition systems face several challenges compared to server-based systems. They have to meet stricter constraints in terms of speed, disk size and memory while maintaining the same accuracy. Often they have to serve several applications with different distributions at once, such as communicating with a virtual assistant and speech-to-text. The simplest solution to serve multiple applications is to build application-specific (language) models, but this leads to an increase in memory. Therefore, we explore different data- and architecture-driven language modeling approaches to build a single application-agnostic model. We propose two novel feed-forward architectures that find an optimal trade off between different on-device constraints. In comparison to the application-specific solution, one of our novel approaches reduces the disk size by half, while maintaining speed and accuracy of the original model.

Recent advancements in large multimodal language models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across a wide range of tasks. Yet, these models still struggle with understanding the nuances of human humor through juxtaposition, particularly when it involves nonlinear narratives that underpin many jokes and humor cues. This paper investigates this challenge by focusing on comics with contradictory narratives, where each comic consists of two panels that create a humorous contradiction. We introduce the YesBut benchmark, which comprises tasks of varying difficulty aimed at assessing AI's capabilities in recognizing and interpreting these comics, ranging from literal content comprehension to deep narrative reasoning. Through extensive experimentation and analysis of recent commercial or open-sourced large (vision) language models, we assess their capability to comprehend the complex interplay of the narrative humor inherent in these comics. Our results show that even state-of-the-art models still lag behind human performance on this task. Our findings offer insights into the current limitations and potential improvements for AI in understanding human creative expressions.

Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before task-specific fine-tuning. Language models possess basic capabilities in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, world knowledge, and reasoning, but these capabilities are sensitive to specific inputs and surface features. Despite dramatic increases in generated text quality as models scale to hundreds of billions of parameters, the models are still prone to unfactual responses, commonsense errors, memorized text, and social biases. Many of these weaknesses can be framed as over-generalizations or under-generalizations of learned patterns in text. We synthesize recent results to highlight what is currently known about what large language models can and cannot do.

There has been significant progress in emotional Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis technology in recent years. However, existing methods primarily focus on the synthesis of a limited number of emotion types and have achieved unsatisfactory performance in intensity control. To address these limitations, we propose EmoMix, which can generate emotional speech with specified intensity or a mixture of emotions. Specifically, EmoMix is a controllable emotional TTS model based on a diffusion probabilistic model and a pre-trained speech emotion recognition (SER) model used to extract emotion embedding. Mixed emotion synthesis is achieved by combining the noises predicted by diffusion model conditioned on different emotions during only one sampling process at the run-time. We further apply the Neutral and specific primary emotion mixed in varying degrees to control intensity. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of EmoMix for synthesizing mixed emotion and intensity control.

Some users of social media are spreading racist, sexist, and otherwise hateful content. For the purpose of training a hate speech detection system, the reliability of the annotations is crucial, but there is no universally agreed-upon definition. We collected potentially hateful messages and asked two groups of internet users to determine whether they were hate speech or not, whether they should be banned or not and to rate their degree of offensiveness. One of the groups was shown a definition prior to completing the survey. We aimed to assess whether hate speech can be annotated reliably, and the extent to which existing definitions are in accordance with subjective ratings. Our results indicate that showing users a definition caused them to partially align their own opinion with the definition but did not improve reliability, which was very low overall. We conclude that the presence of hate speech should perhaps not be considered a binary yes-or-no decision, and raters need more detailed instructions for the annotation.

Free-text rationales justify model decisions in natural language and thus become likable and accessible among approaches to explanation across many tasks. However, their effectiveness can be hindered by misinterpretation and hallucination. As a perturbation test, we investigate how large language models (LLMs) perform rationale generation under the effects of readability level control, i.e., being prompted for an explanation targeting a specific expertise level, such as sixth grade or college. We find that explanations are adaptable to such instruction, though the requested readability is often misaligned with the measured text complexity according to traditional readability metrics. Furthermore, the generated rationales tend to feature medium level complexity, which correlates with the measured quality using automatic metrics. Finally, our human annotators confirm a generally satisfactory impression on rationales at all readability levels, with high-school-level readability being most commonly perceived and favored.

What makes a good Large Language Model (LLM)? That it performs well on the relevant benchmarks -- which hopefully measure, with some validity, the presence of capabilities that are also challenged in real application. But what makes the model perform well? What gives a model its abilities? We take a recently introduced type of benchmark that is meant to challenge capabilities in a goal-directed, agentive context through self-play of conversational games, and analyse how performance develops as a function of model characteristics like number of parameters, or type of training. We find that while there is a clear relationship between number of parameters and performance, there is still a wide spread of performance points within a given size bracket, which is to be accounted for by training parameters such as fine-tuning data quality and method. From a more practical angle, we also find a certain degree of unpredictability about performance across access methods, possible due to unexposed sampling parameters, and a, very welcome, performance stability against at least moderate weight quantisation during inference.

Indonesia ranks fourth globally in the number of deaf cases. Individuals with hearing impairments often find communication challenging, necessitating the use of sign language. However, there are limited public services that offer such inclusivity. On the other hand, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) present promising solutions to overcome communication barriers faced by the deaf. This study aims to explore the application of AI in developing models for a simplified sign language translation app and dictionary, designed for integration into public service facilities, to facilitate communication for individuals with hearing impairments, thereby enhancing inclusivity in public services. The researchers compared the performance of LSTM and 1D CNN + Transformer (1DCNNTrans) models for sign language recognition. Through rigorous testing and validation, it was found that the LSTM model achieved an accuracy of 94.67%, while the 1DCNNTrans model achieved an accuracy of 96.12%. Model performance evaluation indicated that although the LSTM exhibited lower inference latency, it showed weaknesses in classifying classes with similar keypoints. In contrast, the 1DCNNTrans model demonstrated greater stability and higher F1 scores for classes with varying levels of complexity compared to the LSTM model. Both models showed excellent performance, exceeding 90% validation accuracy and demonstrating rapid classification of 50 sign language gestures.

There is an increasing trend towards evaluating NLP models with LLM-generated judgments instead of human judgments. In the absence of a comparison against human data, this raises concerns about the validity of these evaluations; in case they are conducted with proprietary models, this also raises concerns over reproducibility. We provide JUDGE-BENCH, a collection of 20 NLP datasets with human annotations, and comprehensively evaluate 11 current LLMs, covering both open-weight and proprietary models, for their ability to replicate the annotations. Our evaluations show that each LLM exhibits a large variance across datasets in its correlation to human judgments. We conclude that LLMs are not yet ready to systematically replace human judges in NLP.

We address the challenge of representing long captions in vision-language models, such as CLIP. By design these models are limited by fixed, absolute positional encodings, restricting inputs to a maximum of 77 tokens and hindering performance on tasks requiring longer descriptions. Although recent work has attempted to overcome this limit, their proposed approaches struggle to model token relationships over longer distances and simply extend to a fixed new token length. Instead, we propose a generalizable method, named TULIP, able to upgrade the token length to any length for CLIP-like models. We do so by improving the architecture with relative position encodings, followed by a training procedure that (i) distills the original CLIP text encoder into an encoder with relative position encodings and (ii) enhances the model for aligning longer captions with images. By effectively encoding captions longer than the default 77 tokens, our model outperforms baselines on cross-modal tasks such as retrieval and text-to-image generation.

"An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements" (Young, J.W.). The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and publicly available ChatGPT have marked a significant turning point in the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into people's everyday lives. This study explores the capability of LLMs in generating novel research ideas based on information from research papers. We conduct a thorough examination of 4 LLMs in five domains (e.g., Chemistry, Computer, Economics, Medical, and Physics). We found that the future research ideas generated by Claude-2 and GPT-4 are more aligned with the author's perspective than GPT-3.5 and Gemini. We also found that Claude-2 generates more diverse future research ideas than GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and Gemini 1.0. We further performed a human evaluation of the novelty, relevancy, and feasibility of the generated future research ideas. This investigation offers insights into the evolving role of LLMs in idea generation, highlighting both its capability and limitations. Our work contributes to the ongoing efforts in evaluating and utilizing language models for generating future research ideas. We make our datasets and codes publicly available.

While acoustic expressiveness has long been studied in expressive text-to-speech (ETTS), the inherent expressiveness in text lacks sufficient attention, especially for ETTS of artistic works. In this paper, we introduce StoryTTS, a highly ETTS dataset that contains rich expressiveness both in acoustic and textual perspective, from the recording of a Mandarin storytelling show. A systematic and comprehensive labeling framework is proposed for textual expressiveness. We analyze and define speech-related textual expressiveness in StoryTTS to include five distinct dimensions through linguistics, rhetoric, etc. Then we employ large language models and prompt them with a few manual annotation examples for batch annotation. The resulting corpus contains 61 hours of consecutive and highly prosodic speech equipped with accurate text transcriptions and rich textual expressiveness annotations. Therefore, StoryTTS can aid future ETTS research to fully mine the abundant intrinsic textual and acoustic features. Experiments are conducted to validate that TTS models can generate speech with improved expressiveness when integrating with the annotated textual labels in StoryTTS.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from traditional computing tasks to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) applications. This widespread adoption has spurred extensive research into LLMs across various disciplines, including the social sciences. Notably, studies have revealed that LLMs possess emotional intelligence, which can be further developed through positive emotional stimuli. This discovery raises an intriguing question: can negative emotions similarly influence LLMs, potentially enhancing their performance? In response to this question, we introduce NegativePrompt, a novel approach underpinned by psychological principles, involving ten specifically designed negative emotional stimuli. We embark on rigorous experimental evaluations of five LLMs including Flan-T5-Large, Vicuna, Llama 2, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, across a set of 45 tasks. The results are revealing: NegativePrompt markedly enhances the performance of LLMs, evidenced by relative improvements of 12.89% in Instruction Induction tasks and 46.25% in BIG-Bench tasks. Moreover, we conduct attention visualization experiments to decipher the underlying mechanisms of NegativePrompt's influence. Our research contributes significantly to the understanding of LLMs and emotion interaction, demonstrating the practical efficacy of NegativePrompt as an emotion-driven method and offering novel insights for the enhancement of LLMs in real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/wangxu0820/NegativePrompt.

Journalists are among the many users of large language models (LLMs). To better understand the journalist-AI interactions, we conduct a study of LLM usage by two news agencies through browsing the WildChat dataset, identifying candidate interactions, and verifying them by matching to online published articles. Our analysis uncovers instances where journalists provide sensitive material such as confidential correspondence with sources or articles from other agencies to the LLM as stimuli and prompt it to generate articles, and publish these machine-generated articles with limited intervention (median output-publication ROUGE-L of 0.62). Based on our findings, we call for further research into what constitutes responsible use of AI, and the establishment of clear guidelines and best practices on using LLMs in a journalistic context.

The recent release of very large language models such as PaLM and GPT-4 has made an unprecedented impact in the popular media and public consciousness, giving rise to a mixture of excitement and fear as to their capabilities and potential uses, and shining a light on natural language processing research which had not previously received so much attention. The developments offer great promise for education technology, and in this paper we look specifically at the potential for incorporating large language models in AI-driven language teaching and assessment systems. We consider several research areas and also discuss the risks and ethical considerations surrounding generative AI in education technology for language learners. Overall we find that larger language models offer improvements over previous models in text generation, opening up routes toward content generation which had not previously been plausible. For text generation they must be prompted carefully and their outputs may need to be reshaped before they are ready for use. For automated grading and grammatical error correction, tasks whose progress is checked on well-known benchmarks, early investigations indicate that large language models on their own do not improve on state-of-the-art results according to standard evaluation metrics. For grading it appears that linguistic features established in the literature should still be used for best performance, and for error correction it may be that the models can offer alternative feedback styles which are not measured sensitively with existing methods. In all cases, there is work to be done to experiment with the inclusion of large language models in education technology for language learners, in order to properly understand and report on their capacities and limitations, and to ensure that foreseeable risks such as misinformation and harmful bias are mitigated.

Large language models (LLMs) famously exhibit emergent in-context learning (ICL) -- the ability to rapidly adapt to new tasks using few-shot examples provided as a prompt, without updating the model's weights. Built on top of LLMs, vision large language models (VLLMs) have advanced significantly in areas such as recognition, reasoning, and grounding. However, investigations into multimodal ICL have predominantly focused on few-shot visual question answering (VQA), and image captioning, which we will show neither exploit the strengths of ICL, nor test its limitations. The broader capabilities and limitations of multimodal ICL remain under-explored. In this study, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark VL-ICL Bench for multimodal in-context learning, encompassing a broad spectrum of tasks that involve both images and text as inputs and outputs, and different types of challenges, from {perception to reasoning and long context length}. We evaluate the abilities of state-of-the-art VLLMs against this benchmark suite, revealing their diverse strengths and weaknesses, and showing that even the most advanced models, such as GPT-4, find the tasks challenging. By highlighting a range of new ICL tasks, and the associated strengths and limitations of existing models, we hope that our dataset will inspire future work on enhancing the in-context learning capabilities of VLLMs, as well as inspire new applications that leverage VLLM ICL. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ys-zong/VL-ICL.

Generic `toxicity' classifiers continue to be used for evaluating the potential for harm in natural language generation, despite mounting evidence of their shortcomings. We consider the challenge of measuring misogyny in natural language generation, and argue that generic `toxicity' classifiers are inadequate for this task. We use data from two well-characterised `Incel' communities on Reddit that differ primarily in their degrees of misogyny to construct a pair of training corpora which we use to fine-tune two language models. We show that an open source `toxicity' classifier is unable to distinguish meaningfully between generations from these models. We contrast this with a misogyny-specific lexicon recently proposed by feminist subject-matter experts, demonstrating that, despite the limitations of simple lexicon-based approaches, this shows promise as a benchmark to evaluate language models for misogyny, and that it is sensitive enough to reveal the known differences in these Reddit communities. Our preliminary findings highlight the limitations of a generic approach to evaluating harms, and further emphasise the need for careful benchmark design and selection in natural language evaluation.

The rapid adoption of generative language models has brought about substantial advancements in digital communication, while simultaneously raising concerns regarding the potential misuse of AI-generated content. Although numerous detection methods have been proposed to differentiate between AI and human-generated content, the fairness and robustness of these detectors remain underexplored. In this study, we evaluate the performance of several widely-used GPT detectors using writing samples from native and non-native English writers. Our findings reveal that these detectors consistently misclassify non-native English writing samples as AI-generated, whereas native writing samples are accurately identified. Furthermore, we demonstrate that simple prompting strategies can not only mitigate this bias but also effectively bypass GPT detectors, suggesting that GPT detectors may unintentionally penalize writers with constrained linguistic expressions. Our results call for a broader conversation about the ethical implications of deploying ChatGPT content detectors and caution against their use in evaluative or educational settings, particularly when they may inadvertently penalize or exclude non-native English speakers from the global discourse.

The rise in popularity of ChatGPT and GPT-4 has significantly accelerated the development of large models, leading to the creation of numerous impressive large language models(LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). These cutting-edge models owe their remarkable performance to high-quality data. However, the details of the training data used in leading paradigms are often kept confidential. This lack of transparency, coupled with the scarcity of open-source data, impedes further developments within the community. As a response, this paper presents "Wan Juan", a large-scale multimodal dataset composed of both Chinese and English data, collected from a wide range of web sources. The dataset incorporates text, image-text, and video modalities, with a total volume exceeding 2TB. It was utilized in the training of InternLM, a model that demonstrated significant advantages in multi-dimensional evaluations when compared to models of a similar scale. All data can be accessed at https://opendatalab.org.cn/WanJuan1.0.

Many specialized domains remain untouched by deep learning, as large labeled datasets require expensive expert annotators. We address this bottleneck within the legal domain by introducing the Contract Understanding Atticus Dataset (CUAD), a new dataset for legal contract review. CUAD was created with dozens of legal experts from The Atticus Project and consists of over 13,000 annotations. The task is to highlight salient portions of a contract that are important for a human to review. We find that Transformer models have nascent performance, but that this performance is strongly influenced by model design and training dataset size. Despite these promising results, there is still substantial room for improvement. As one of the only large, specialized NLP benchmarks annotated by experts, CUAD can serve as a challenging research benchmark for the broader NLP community.

Previous work has shown that there exists a scaling law between the size of Language Models (LMs) and their zero-shot performance on different downstream NLP tasks. In this work, we show that this phenomenon does not hold when evaluating large LMs on tasks with negated prompts, but instead shows an inverse scaling law. We evaluate 9 different tasks with negated prompts on (1) pretrained LMs (OPT & GPT-3) of varying sizes (125M - 175B), (2) LMs further pretrained to generalize to novel prompts (InstructGPT), (3) LMs provided with few-shot examples, and (4) LMs fine-tuned specifically on negated prompts; all LM types perform worse on negated prompts as they scale and show a huge performance gap between the human performance when comparing the average score on both original and negated prompts. By highlighting a critical limitation of existing LMs and methods, we urge the community to develop new approaches of developing LMs that actually follow the given instructions. We provide the code and the datasets to explore negated prompts at https://github.com/joeljang/negated-prompts-for-llms

Automatic disease diagnosis has become increasingly valuable in clinical practice. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence, with growing evidence supporting the efficacy of LLMs in diagnostic tasks. Despite the increasing attention in this field, a holistic view is still lacking. Many critical aspects remain unclear, such as the diseases and clinical data to which LLMs have been applied, the LLM techniques employed, and the evaluation methods used. In this article, we perform a comprehensive review of LLM-based methods for disease diagnosis. Our review examines the existing literature across various dimensions, including disease types and associated clinical specialties, clinical data, LLM techniques, and evaluation methods. Additionally, we offer recommendations for applying and evaluating LLMs for diagnostic tasks. Furthermore, we assess the limitations of current research and discuss future directions. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review for LLM-based disease diagnosis.

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a diverse range of applications. These models excel in generating text completions that are contextually coherent and cover an extensive array of subjects. However, the vast datasets required for their training make aligning response styles during the pretraining and instruction tuning phases challenging. Consequently, an additional alignment phase is typically employed, wherein the model is further trained with human preference data to better align its outputs with human expectations. While this process doesn't introduce new capabilities per se, it does accentuate generation styles innate to the model. This paper explores the utilization of counterfactual prompting within the framework of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align the model's style without relying on human intervention. We demonstrate that this method effectively instils desirable behaviour, mitigates undesirable ones, and encourages the model to disregard inappropriate instructions. Our findings suggest that counterfactual prompting with DPO presents a low-resource way to fine-tune LLMs to meet the demands for responsible and ethically aligned AI systems.

Since the Internet is flooded with hate, it is one of the main tasks for NLP experts to master automated online content moderation. However, advancements in this field require improved access to publicly available accurate and non-synthetic datasets of social media content. For the Polish language, such resources are very limited. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting a new open dataset of offensive social media content for the Polish language. The dataset comprises content from Wykop.pl, a popular online service often referred to as the "Polish Reddit", reported by users and banned in the internal moderation process. It contains a total of 691,662 posts and comments, evenly divided into two categories: "harmful" and "neutral" ("non-harmful"). The anonymized subset of the BAN-PL dataset consisting on 24,000 pieces (12,000 for each class), along with preprocessing scripts have been made publicly available. Furthermore the paper offers valuable insights into real-life content moderation processes and delves into an analysis of linguistic features and content characteristics of the dataset. Moreover, a comprehensive anonymization procedure has been meticulously described and applied. The prevalent biases encountered in similar datasets, including post-moderation and pre-selection biases, are also discussed.

Multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) has emerged as a promising research direction. Nonetheless, numerous limitations exist within existing public MSMO datasets, including insufficient upkeep, data inaccessibility, limited size, and the absence of proper categorization, which pose significant challenges to effective research. To address these challenges and provide a comprehensive dataset for this new direction, we have meticulously curated the MultiSum dataset. Our new dataset features (1) Human-validated summaries for both video and textual content, providing superior human instruction and labels for multimodal learning. (2) Comprehensively and meticulously arranged categorization, spanning 17 principal categories and 170 subcategories to encapsulate a diverse array of real-world scenarios. (3) Benchmark tests performed on the proposed dataset to assess varied tasks and methods, including video temporal segmentation, video summarization, text summarization, and multimodal summarization. To champion accessibility and collaboration, we release the MultiSum dataset and the data collection tool as fully open-source resources, fostering transparency and accelerating future developments. Our project website can be found at https://multisum-dataset.github.io/.

Rapid advancements in large language models have unlocked remarkable capabilities when it comes to processing and summarizing unstructured text data. This has implications for the analysis of rich, open-ended datasets, such as survey responses, where LLMs hold the promise of efficiently distilling key themes and sentiments. However, as organizations increasingly turn to these powerful AI systems to make sense of textual feedback, a critical question arises, can we trust LLMs to accurately represent the perspectives contained within these text based datasets? While LLMs excel at generating human-like summaries, there is a risk that their outputs may inadvertently diverge from the true substance of the original responses. Discrepancies between the LLM-generated outputs and the actual themes present in the data could lead to flawed decision-making, with far-reaching consequences for organizations. This research investigates the effectiveness of LLMs as judge models to evaluate the thematic alignment of summaries generated by other LLMs. We utilized an Anthropic Claude model to generate thematic summaries from open-ended survey responses, with Amazon's Titan Express, Nova Pro, and Meta's Llama serving as LLM judges. The LLM-as-judge approach was compared to human evaluations using Cohen's kappa, Spearman's rho, and Krippendorff's alpha, validating a scalable alternative to traditional human centric evaluation methods. Our findings reveal that while LLMs as judges offer a scalable solution comparable to human raters, humans may still excel at detecting subtle, context-specific nuances. This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge on AI assisted text analysis. We discuss limitations and provide recommendations for future research, emphasizing the need for careful consideration when generalizing LLM judge models across various contexts and use cases.

Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Understanding the harms and offensiveness of statements requires reasoning about the social and situational context in which statements are made. For example, the utterance "your English is very good" may implicitly signal an insult when uttered by a white man to a non-white colleague, but uttered by an ESL teacher to their student would be interpreted as a genuine compliment. Such contextual factors have been largely ignored by previous approaches to toxic language detection. We introduce COBRA frames, the first context-aware formalism for explaining the intents, reactions, and harms of offensive or biased statements grounded in their social and situational context. We create COBRACORPUS, a dataset of 33k potentially offensive statements paired with machine-generated contexts and free-text explanations of offensiveness, implied biases, speaker intents, and listener reactions. To study the contextual dynamics of offensiveness, we train models to generate COBRA explanations, with and without access to the context. We find that explanations by context-agnostic models are significantly worse than by context-aware ones, especially in situations where the context inverts the statement's offensiveness (29% accuracy drop). Our work highlights the importance and feasibility of contextualized NLP by modeling social factors.

Large language models have a range of beneficial uses: they can assist in prose, poetry, and programming; analyze dataset biases; and more. However, their flexibility and generative capabilities also raise misuse concerns. This report discusses OpenAI's work related to the release of its GPT-2 language model. It discusses staged release, which allows time between model releases to conduct risk and benefit analyses as model sizes increased. It also discusses ongoing partnership-based research and provides recommendations for better coordination and responsible publication in AI.

With the growing reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) for many different applications, the sharing of code, data, and models is important to ensure the replicability and democratization of scientific knowledge. Many high-profile academic publishing venues expect code and models to be submitted and released with papers. Furthermore, developers often want to release these assets to encourage development of technology that leverages their frameworks and services. A number of organizations have expressed concerns about the inappropriate or irresponsible use of AI and have proposed ethical guidelines around the application of such systems. While such guidelines can help set norms and shape policy, they are not easily enforceable. In this paper, we advocate the use of licensing to enable legally enforceable behavioral use conditions on software and code and provide several case studies that demonstrate the feasibility of behavioral use licensing. We envision how licensing may be implemented in accordance with existing responsible AI guidelines.

In this position paper, we argue that the classical evaluation on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using annotated benchmarks is in trouble. The worst kind of data contamination happens when a Large Language Model (LLM) is trained on the test split of a benchmark, and then evaluated in the same benchmark. The extent of the problem is unknown, as it is not straightforward to measure. Contamination causes an overestimation of the performance of a contaminated model in a target benchmark and associated task with respect to their non-contaminated counterparts. The consequences can be very harmful, with wrong scientific conclusions being published while other correct ones are discarded. This position paper defines different levels of data contamination and argues for a community effort, including the development of automatic and semi-automatic measures to detect when data from a benchmark was exposed to a model, and suggestions for flagging papers with conclusions that are compromised by data contamination.

Improvements in language models' capabilities have pushed their applications towards longer contexts, making long-context evaluation and development an active research area. However, many disparate use-cases are grouped together under the umbrella term of "long-context", defined simply by the total length of the model's input, including - for example - Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks, book summarization, and information aggregation. Given their varied difficulty, in this position paper we argue that conflating different tasks by their context length is unproductive. As a community, we require a more precise vocabulary to understand what makes long-context tasks similar or different. We propose to unpack the taxonomy of long-context based on the properties that make them more difficult with longer contexts. We propose two orthogonal axes of difficulty: (I) Diffusion: How hard is it to find the necessary information in the context? (II) Scope: How much necessary information is there to find? We survey the literature on long-context, provide justification for this taxonomy as an informative descriptor, and situate the literature with respect to it. We conclude that the most difficult and interesting settings, whose necessary information is very long and highly diffused within the input, is severely under-explored. By using a descriptive vocabulary and discussing the relevant properties of difficulty in long-context, we can implement more informed research in this area. We call for a careful design of tasks and benchmarks with distinctly long context, taking into account the characteristics that make it qualitatively different from shorter context.

Ensuring that online discussions are civil and productive is a major challenge for social media platforms. Such platforms usually rely both on users and on automated detection tools to flag inappropriate arguments of other users, which moderators then review. However, this kind of post-hoc moderation is expensive and time-consuming, and moderators are often overwhelmed by the amount and severity of flagged content. Instead, a promising alternative is to prevent negative behavior during content creation. This paper studies how inappropriate language in arguments can be computationally mitigated. We propose a reinforcement learning-based rewriting approach that balances content preservation and appropriateness based on existing classifiers, prompting an instruction-finetuned large language model (LLM) as our initial policy. Unlike related style transfer tasks, rewriting inappropriate arguments allows deleting and adding content permanently. It is therefore tackled on document level rather than sentence level. We evaluate different weighting schemes for the reward function in both absolute and relative human assessment studies. Systematic experiments on non-parallel data provide evidence that our approach can mitigate the inappropriateness of arguments while largely preserving their content. It significantly outperforms competitive baselines, including few-shot learning, prompting, and humans.

Many socio-linguistic cues are used in conversational analysis, such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue acts. One of the fundamental cues is politeness, which linguistically possesses properties such as social manners useful in conversational analysis. This article presents findings of polite emotional dialogue act associations, where we can correlate the relationships between the socio-linguistic cues. We confirm our hypothesis that the utterances with the emotion classes Anger and Disgust are more likely to be impolite. At the same time, Happiness and Sadness are more likely to be polite. A less expectable phenomenon occurs with dialogue acts Inform and Commissive which contain more polite utterances than Question and Directive. Finally, we conclude on the future work of these findings to extend the learning of social behaviours using politeness.

Many AI companies are training their large language models (LLMs) on data without the permission of the copyright owners. The permissibility of doing so varies by jurisdiction: in countries like the EU and Japan, this is allowed under certain restrictions, while in the United States, the legal landscape is more ambiguous. Regardless of the legal status, concerns from creative producers have led to several high-profile copyright lawsuits, and the threat of litigation is commonly cited as a reason for the recent trend towards minimizing the information shared about training datasets by both corporate and public interest actors. This trend in limiting data information causes harm by hindering transparency, accountability, and innovation in the broader ecosystem by denying researchers, auditors, and impacted individuals access to the information needed to understand AI models. While this could be mitigated by training language models on open access and public domain data, at the time of writing, there are no such models (trained at a meaningful scale) due to the substantial technical and sociological challenges in assembling the necessary corpus. These challenges include incomplete and unreliable metadata, the cost and complexity of digitizing physical records, and the diverse set of legal and technical skills required to ensure relevance and responsibility in a quickly changing landscape. Building towards a future where AI systems can be trained on openly licensed data that is responsibly curated and governed requires collaboration across legal, technical, and policy domains, along with investments in metadata standards, digitization, and fostering a culture of openness.

The development of large language models tailored for handling patients' clinical notes is often hindered by the limited accessibility and usability of these notes due to strict privacy regulations. To address these challenges, we first create synthetic large-scale clinical notes using publicly available case reports extracted from biomedical literature. We then use these synthetic notes to train our specialized clinical large language model, Asclepius. While Asclepius is trained on synthetic data, we assess its potential performance in real-world applications by evaluating it using real clinical notes. We benchmark Asclepius against several other large language models, including GPT-3.5-turbo and other open-source alternatives. To further validate our approach using synthetic notes, we also compare Asclepius with its variants trained on real clinical notes. Our findings convincingly demonstrate that synthetic clinical notes can serve as viable substitutes for real ones when constructing high-performing clinical language models. This conclusion is supported by detailed evaluations conducted by both GPT-4 and medical professionals. All resources including weights, codes, and data used in the development of Asclepius are made publicly accessible for future research.

Modern language models paradoxically combine unprecedented capability with persistent vulnerability in that they can draft poetry yet cannot reliably refuse harmful requests. We reveal this fragility stems not from inadequate training, but from a fundamental architectural limitation: transformers process all tokens as equals. Transformers operate as computational democracies, granting equal voice to all tokens. This is a design tragically unsuited for AGI, where we cannot risk adversarial "candidates" hijacking the system. Through formal analysis, we demonstrate that safety instructions fundamentally lack privileged status in transformer architectures, that they compete with adversarial inputs in the same computational arena, making robust alignment through prompting or fine-tuning inherently limited. This "token democracy" explains why jailbreaks bypass even extensively safety-trained models and why positional shifts erode prompt effectiveness. Our work systematizes practitioners' tacit knowledge into an architectural critique, showing current alignment approaches create mere preferences, not constraints.

Methods for understanding the decisions of and mechanisms underlying deep neural networks (DNNs) typically rely on building intuition by emphasizing sensory or semantic features of individual examples. For instance, methods aim to visualize the components of an input which are "important" to a network's decision, or to measure the semantic properties of single neurons. Here, we argue that interpretability research suffers from an over-reliance on intuition-based approaches that risk-and in some cases have caused-illusory progress and misleading conclusions. We identify a set of limitations that we argue impede meaningful progress in interpretability research, and examine two popular classes of interpretability methods-saliency and single-neuron-based approaches-that serve as case studies for how overreliance on intuition and lack of falsifiability can undermine interpretability research. To address these concerns, we propose a strategy to address these impediments in the form of a framework for strongly falsifiable interpretability research. We encourage researchers to use their intuitions as a starting point to develop and test clear, falsifiable hypotheses, and hope that our framework yields robust, evidence-based interpretability methods that generate meaningful advances in our understanding of DNNs.

Throughout the course of my Ph.D., I have been designing the user experience (UX) of various machine learning (ML) systems. In this workshop, I share two projects as case studies in which people engage with ML in much more complicated and nuanced ways than the technical HCML work might assume. The first case study describes how cardiology teams in three hospitals used a clinical decision-support system that helps them decide whether and when to implant an artificial heart to a heart failure patient. I demonstrate that physicians cannot draw on their decision-making experience by seeing only patient data on paper. They are also confused by some fundamental premises upon which ML operates. For example, physicians asked: Are ML predictions made based on clinicians' best efforts? Is it ethical to make decisions based on previous patients' collective outcomes? In the second case study, my collaborators and I designed an intelligent text editor, with the goal of improving authors' writing experience with NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies. We prototyped a number of generative functionalities where the system provides phrase-or-sentence-level writing suggestions upon user request. When writing with the prototype, however, authors shared that they need to "see where the sentence is going two paragraphs later" in order to decide whether the suggestion aligns with their writing; Some even considered adopting machine suggestions as plagiarism, therefore "is simply wrong". By sharing these unexpected and intriguing responses from these real-world ML users, I hope to start a discussion about such previously-unknown complexities and nuances of -- as the workshop proposal states -- "putting ML at the service of people in a way that is accessible, useful, and trustworthy to all".

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention in the medical domain for their human-level capabilities, leading to increased efforts to explore their potential in various healthcare applications. However, despite such a promising future, there are multiple challenges and obstacles that remain for their real-world uses in practical settings. This work discusses key challenges for LLMs in medical applications from four unique aspects: operational vulnerabilities, ethical and social considerations, performance and assessment difficulties, and legal and regulatory compliance. Addressing these challenges is crucial for leveraging LLMs to their full potential and ensuring their responsible integration into healthcare.

Caution: this paper may include material that could be offensive or distressing. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates the development of training approaches that mitigate the generation of unethical language and aptly manage toxic user queries. Given the challenges related to human labor and the scarcity of data, we present KoTox, comprising 39K unethical instruction-output pairs. This collection of automatically generated toxic instructions refines the training of LLMs and establishes a foundational framework for improving LLMs' ethical awareness and response to various toxic inputs, promoting more secure and responsible interactions in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications.

Caution: This paper includes offensive words that could potentially cause unpleasantness. Language models (LMs) are vulnerable to exploitation for adversarial misuse. Training LMs for safety alignment is extensive and makes it hard to respond to fast-developing attacks immediately, such as jailbreaks. We propose self-refine with formatting that achieves outstanding safety even in non-safety-aligned LMs and evaluate our method alongside several defense baselines, demonstrating that it is the safest training-free method against jailbreak attacks. Additionally, we proposed a formatting method that improves the efficiency of the self-refine process while reducing attack success rates in fewer iterations. We've also observed that non-safety-aligned LMs outperform safety-aligned LMs in safety tasks by giving more helpful and safe responses. In conclusion, our findings can achieve less safety risk with fewer computational costs, allowing non-safety LM to be easily utilized in real-world service.

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted as a fundamental component of language technologies, it is crucial to accurately characterize their performance. Because choices in prompt design can strongly influence model behavior, this design process is critical in effectively using any modern pre-trained generative language model. In this work, we focus on LLM sensitivity to a quintessential class of meaning-preserving design choices: prompt formatting. We find that several widely used open-source LLMs are extremely sensitive to subtle changes in prompt formatting in few-shot settings, with performance differences of up to 76 accuracy points when evaluated using LLaMA-2-13B. Sensitivity remains even when increasing model size, the number of few-shot examples, or performing instruction tuning. Our analysis suggests that work evaluating LLMs with prompting-based methods would benefit from reporting a range of performance across plausible prompt formats, instead of the currently-standard practice of reporting performance on a single format. We also show that format performance only weakly correlates between models, which puts into question the methodological validity of comparing models with an arbitrarily chosen, fixed prompt format. To facilitate systematic analysis we propose FormatSpread, an algorithm that rapidly evaluates a sampled set of plausible prompt formats for a given task, and reports the interval of expected performance without accessing model weights. Furthermore, we present a suite of analyses that characterize the nature of this sensitivity, including exploring the influence of particular atomic perturbations and the internal representation of particular formats.

State-of-the-art language models (LMs) are notoriously susceptible to generating hallucinated information. Such inaccurate outputs not only undermine the reliability of these models but also limit their use and raise serious concerns about misinformation and propaganda. In this work, we focus on hallucinated book and article references and present them as the "model organism" of language model hallucination research, due to their frequent and easy-to-discern nature. We posit that if a language model cites a particular reference in its output, then it should ideally possess sufficient information about its authors and content, among other relevant details. Using this basic insight, we illustrate that one can identify hallucinated references without ever consulting any external resources, by asking a set of direct or indirect queries to the language model about the references. These queries can be considered as "consistency checks." Our findings highlight that while LMs, including GPT-4, often produce inconsistent author lists for hallucinated references, they also often accurately recall the authors of real references. In this sense, the LM can be said to "know" when it is hallucinating references. Furthermore, these findings show how hallucinated references can be dissected to shed light on their nature. Replication code and results can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/hallucinated-references.

Formal and distributional semantic models offer complementary benefits in modeling meaning. The categorical compositional distributional (DisCoCat) model of meaning of Coecke et al. (arXiv:1003.4394v1 [cs.CL]) combines aspected of both to provide a general framework in which meanings of words, obtained distributionally, are composed using methods from the logical setting to form sentence meaning. Concrete consequences of this general abstract setting and applications to empirical data are under active study (Grefenstette et al., arxiv:1101.0309; Grefenstette and Sadrzadeh, arXiv:1106.4058v1 [cs.CL]). . In this paper, we extend this study by examining transitive verbs, represented as matrices in a DisCoCat. We discuss three ways of constructing such matrices, and evaluate each method in a disambiguation task developed by Grefenstette and Sadrzadeh (arXiv:1106.4058v1 [cs.CL]).

Language models are often used as the backbone of modern dialogue systems. These models are pre-trained on large amounts of written fluent language. Repetition is typically penalised when evaluating language model generations. However, it is a key component of dialogue. Humans use local and partner specific repetitions; these are preferred by human users and lead to more successful communication in dialogue. In this study, we evaluate (a) whether language models produce human-like levels of repetition in dialogue, and (b) what are the processing mechanisms related to lexical re-use they use during comprehension. We believe that such joint analysis of model production and comprehension behaviour can inform the development of cognitively inspired dialogue generation systems.

Telling stories is an integral part of human communication which can evoke emotions and influence the affective states of the audience. Automatically modeling emotional trajectories in stories has thus attracted considerable scholarly interest. However, as most existing works have been limited to unsupervised dictionary-based approaches, there is no benchmark for this task. We address this gap by introducing continuous valence and arousal labels for an existing dataset of children's stories originally annotated with discrete emotion categories. We collect additional annotations for this data and map the categorical labels to the continuous valence and arousal space. For predicting the thus obtained emotionality signals, we fine-tune a DeBERTa model and improve upon this baseline via a weakly supervised learning approach. The best configuration achieves a Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of .8221 for valence and .7125 for arousal on the test set, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed approach. A detailed analysis shows the extent to which the results vary depending on factors such as the author, the individual story, or the section within the story. In addition, we uncover the weaknesses of our approach by investigating examples that prove to be difficult to predict.

DeepFakes, which refer to AI-generated media content, have become an increasing concern due to their use as a means for disinformation. Detecting DeepFakes is currently solved with programmed machine learning algorithms. In this work, we investigate the capabilities of multimodal large language models (LLMs) in DeepFake detection. We conducted qualitative and quantitative experiments to demonstrate multimodal LLMs and show that they can expose AI-generated images through careful experimental design and prompt engineering. This is interesting, considering that LLMs are not inherently tailored for media forensic tasks, and the process does not require programming. We discuss the limitations of multimodal LLMs for these tasks and suggest possible improvements.

The performance of embodied agents has been shown to improve by increasing model parameters, dataset size, and compute. This has been demonstrated in domains from robotics to video games, when generative learning objectives on offline datasets (pre-training) are used to model an agent's behavior (imitation learning) or their environment (world modeling). This paper characterizes the role of scale in these tasks more precisely. Going beyond the simple intuition that `bigger is better', we show that the same types of power laws found in language modeling (e.g. between loss and optimal model size), also arise in world modeling and imitation learning. However, the coefficients of these laws are heavily influenced by the tokenizer, task \& architecture -- this has important implications on the optimal sizing of models and data.

In the absence of nonverbal cues during messaging communication, users express part of their emotions using emojis. Thus, having emojis in the vocabulary of text messaging language models can significantly improve many natural language processing (NLP) applications such as online communication analysis. On the other hand, word embedding models are usually trained on a very large corpus of text such as Wikipedia or Google News datasets that include very few samples with emojis. In this study, we create emojiSpace, which is a combined word-emoji embedding using the word2vec model from the Genism library in Python. We trained emojiSpace on a corpus of more than 4 billion tweets and evaluated it by implementing sentiment analysis on a Twitter dataset containing more than 67 million tweets as an extrinsic task. For this task, we compared the performance of two different classifiers of random forest (RF) and linear support vector machine (SVM). For evaluation, we compared emojiSpace performance with two other pre-trained embeddings and demonstrated that emojiSpace outperforms both.

When large language models (LMs) are applied in zero- or few-shot settings to discriminative tasks such as multiple-choice questions, their attentiveness (i.e., probability mass) is spread across many vocabulary tokens that are not valid choices. Such a spread across multiple surface forms with identical meaning is thought to cause an underestimation of a model's true performance, referred to as the "surface form competition" (SFC) hypothesis. This has motivated the introduction of various probability normalization methods. However, many core questions remain unanswered. How do we measure SFC or attentiveness? Are there direct ways of increasing attentiveness on valid choices? Does increasing attentiveness always improve task accuracy? We propose a mathematical formalism for studying this phenomenon, provide a metric for quantifying attentiveness, and identify a simple method for increasing it -- namely, in-context learning with even just one example containing answer choices. The formalism allows us to quantify SFC and bound its impact. Our experiments on three diverse datasets and six LMs reveal several surprising findings. For example, encouraging models to generate a valid answer choice can, in fact, be detrimental to task performance for some LMs, and prior probability normalization methods are less effective (sometimes even detrimental) to instruction-tuned LMs. We conclude with practical insights for effectively using prompted LMs for multiple-choice tasks.

We investigate how humans perform the task of dubbing video content from one language into another, leveraging a novel corpus of 319.57 hours of video from 54 professionally produced titles. This is the first such large-scale study we are aware of. The results challenge a number of assumptions commonly made in both qualitative literature on human dubbing and machine-learning literature on automatic dubbing, arguing for the importance of vocal naturalness and translation quality over commonly emphasized isometric (character length) and lip-sync constraints, and for a more qualified view of the importance of isochronic (timing) constraints. We also find substantial influence of the source-side audio on human dubs through channels other than the words of the translation, pointing to the need for research on ways to preserve speech characteristics, as well as semantic transfer such as emphasis/emotion, in automatic dubbing systems.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly influenced various aspects of software development activities. Despite their benefits, LLMs also pose notable risks, including the potential to generate harmful content and being abused by malicious developers to create malicious code. Several previous studies have focused on the ability of LLMs to resist the generation of harmful content that violates human ethical standards, such as biased or offensive content. However, there is no research evaluating the ability of LLMs to resist malicious code generation. To fill this gap, we propose RMCBench, the first benchmark comprising 473 prompts designed to assess the ability of LLMs to resist malicious code generation. This benchmark employs two scenarios: a text-to-code scenario, where LLMs are prompted with descriptions to generate code, and a code-to-code scenario, where LLMs translate or complete existing malicious code. Based on RMCBench, we conduct an empirical study on 11 representative LLMs to assess their ability to resist malicious code generation. Our findings indicate that current LLMs have a limited ability to resist malicious code generation with an average refusal rate of 40.36% in text-to-code scenario and 11.52% in code-to-code scenario. The average refusal rate of all LLMs in RMCBench is only 28.71%; ChatGPT-4 has a refusal rate of only 35.73%. We also analyze the factors that affect LLMs' ability to resist malicious code generation and provide implications for developers to enhance model robustness.

We propose leveraging cognitive science research on emotions and communication to improve language models for emotion analysis. First, we present the main emotion theories in psychology and cognitive science. Then, we introduce the main methods of emotion annotation in natural language processing and their connections to psychological theories. We also present the two main types of analyses of emotional communication in cognitive pragmatics. Finally, based on the cognitive science research presented, we propose directions for improving language models for emotion analysis. We suggest that these research efforts pave the way for constructing new annotation schemes, methods, and a possible benchmark for emotional understanding, considering different facets of human emotion and communication.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown a tremendous capacity for generating literary text. However, their effectiveness in generating children's stories has yet to be thoroughly examined. In this study, we evaluate the trustworthiness of children's stories generated by LLMs using various measures, and we compare and contrast our results with both old and new children's stories to better assess their significance. Our findings suggest that LLMs still struggle to generate children's stories at the level of quality and nuance found in actual stories

We study improving social conversational agents by learning from natural dialogue between users and a deployed model, without extra annotations. To implicitly measure the quality of a machine-generated utterance, we leverage signals like user response length, sentiment and reaction of the future human utterances in the collected dialogue episodes. Our experiments use the publicly released deployment data from BlenderBot (Xu et al., 2023). Human evaluation indicates improvements in our new models over baseline responses; however, we find that some proxy signals can lead to more generations with undesirable properties as well. For example, optimizing for conversation length can lead to more controversial or unfriendly generations compared to the baseline, whereas optimizing for positive sentiment or reaction can decrease these behaviors.

There is a growing collection of work analyzing and mitigating societal biases in language understanding, generation, and retrieval tasks, though examining biases in creative tasks remains underexplored. Creative language applications are meant for direct interaction with users, so it is important to quantify and mitigate societal biases in these applications. We introduce a novel study on a pipeline to mitigate societal biases when retrieving next verse suggestions in a poetry composition system. Our results suggest that data augmentation through sentiment style transfer has potential for mitigating societal biases.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to handle various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, concerns regarding the potential negative societal impacts of LLM-generated content have also arisen. To evaluate the biases exhibited by LLMs, researchers have recently proposed a variety of datasets. However, existing bias evaluation efforts often focus on only a particular type of bias and employ inconsistent evaluation metrics, leading to difficulties in comparison across different datasets and LLMs. To address these limitations, we collect a variety of datasets designed for the bias evaluation of LLMs, and further propose CEB, a Compositional Evaluation Benchmark that covers different types of bias across different social groups and tasks. The curation of CEB is based on our newly proposed compositional taxonomy, which characterizes each dataset from three dimensions: bias types, social groups, and tasks. By combining the three dimensions, we develop a comprehensive evaluation strategy for the bias in LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that the levels of bias vary across these dimensions, thereby providing guidance for the development of specific bias mitigation methods.

Background: Rapid advancements in natural language processing have led to the development of large language models with the potential to revolutionize mental health care. These models have shown promise in assisting clinicians and providing support to individuals experiencing various psychological challenges. Objective: This study aims to compare the performance of two large language models, GPT-4 and Chat-GPT, in responding to a set of 18 psychological prompts, to assess their potential applicability in mental health care settings. Methods: A blind methodology was employed, with a clinical psychologist evaluating the models' responses without knowledge of their origins. The prompts encompassed a diverse range of mental health topics, including depression, anxiety, and trauma, to ensure a comprehensive assessment. Results: The results demonstrated a significant difference in performance between the two models (p > 0.05). GPT-4 achieved an average rating of 8.29 out of 10, while Chat-GPT received an average rating of 6.52. The clinical psychologist's evaluation suggested that GPT-4 was more effective at generating clinically relevant and empathetic responses, thereby providing better support and guidance to potential users. Conclusions: This study contributes to the growing body of literature on the applicability of large language models in mental health care settings. The findings underscore the importance of continued research and development in the field to optimize these models for clinical use. Further investigation is necessary to understand the specific factors underlying the performance differences between the two models and to explore their generalizability across various populations and mental health conditions.

A multimodal AI agent is characterized by its ability to process and learn from various types of data, including natural language, visual, and audio inputs, to inform its actions. Despite advancements in large language models that incorporate visual data, such as GPT-4V, effectively translating image-based data into actionable outcomes for AI agents continues to be challenging. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal model that incorporates the concept of functional token specifically designed for AI agent applications. To ensure compatibility with edge devices, our model is optimized to a compact size of less than 1B parameters. Like GPT-4, our model can process both English and Chinese. We demonstrate that this model is capable of operating efficiently on a wide range of edge devices, including as constrained as a Raspberry Pi.

Speech emotion recognition plays a crucial role in human-computer interactions. However, most speech emotion recognition research is biased toward English-speaking adults, which hinders its applicability to other demographic groups in different languages and age groups. In this work, we analyze the transferability of emotion recognition across three different languages--English, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese; and 2 different age groups--adults and the elderly. To conduct the experiment, we develop an English-Mandarin speech emotion benchmark for adults and the elderly, BiMotion, and a Cantonese speech emotion dataset, YueMotion. This study concludes that different language and age groups require specific speech features, thus making cross-lingual inference an unsuitable method. However, cross-group data augmentation is still beneficial to regularize the model, with linguistic distance being a significant influence on cross-lingual transferability. We release publicly release our code at https://github.com/HLTCHKUST/elderly_ser.

Large language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize parts of their training data, and when prompted appropriately, they will emit the memorized training data verbatim. This is undesirable because memorization violates privacy (exposing user data), degrades utility (repeated easy-to-memorize text is often low quality), and hurts fairness (some texts are memorized over others). We describe three log-linear relationships that quantify the degree to which LMs emit memorized training data. Memorization significantly grows as we increase (1) the capacity of a model, (2) the number of times an example has been duplicated, and (3) the number of tokens of context used to prompt the model. Surprisingly, we find the situation becomes more complicated when generalizing these results across model families. On the whole, we find that memorization in LMs is more prevalent than previously believed and will likely get worse as models continues to scale, at least without active mitigations.

Wider access to therapeutic care is one of the biggest challenges in mental health treatment. Due to institutional barriers, some people seeking mental health support have turned to large language models (LLMs) for personalized therapy, even though these models are largely unsanctioned and untested. We investigate the potential and limitations of using LLMs as providers of evidence-based therapy by using mixed methods clinical metrics. Using HELPERT, a prompt run on a large language model using the same process and training as a comparative group of peer counselors, we replicated publicly accessible mental health conversations rooted in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to compare session dynamics and counselor's CBT-based behaviors between original peer support sessions and their reconstructed HELPERT sessions. Two licensed, CBT-trained clinical psychologists evaluated the sessions using the Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale and provided qualitative feedback. Our findings show that the peer sessions are characterized by empathy, small talk, therapeutic alliance, and shared experiences but often exhibit therapist drift. Conversely, HELPERT reconstructed sessions exhibit minimal therapist drift and higher adherence to CBT methods but display a lack of collaboration, empathy, and cultural understanding. Through CTRS ratings and psychologists' feedback, we highlight the importance of human-AI collaboration for scalable mental health. Our work outlines the ethical implication of imparting human-like subjective qualities to LLMs in therapeutic settings, particularly the risk of deceptive empathy, which may lead to unrealistic patient expectations and potential harm.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven their expanding application across various fields. One of the most promising applications is their role as evaluators based on natural language responses, referred to as ''LLMs-as-judges''. This framework has attracted growing attention from both academia and industry due to their excellent effectiveness, ability to generalize across tasks, and interpretability in the form of natural language. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the LLMs-as-judges paradigm from five key perspectives: Functionality, Methodology, Applications, Meta-evaluation, and Limitations. We begin by providing a systematic definition of LLMs-as-Judges and introduce their functionality (Why use LLM judges?). Then we address methodology to construct an evaluation system with LLMs (How to use LLM judges?). Additionally, we investigate the potential domains for their application (Where to use LLM judges?) and discuss methods for evaluating them in various contexts (How to evaluate LLM judges?). Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of the limitations of LLM judges and discuss potential future directions. Through a structured and comprehensive analysis, we aim aims to provide insights on the development and application of LLMs-as-judges in both research and practice. We will continue to maintain the relevant resource list at https://github.com/CSHaitao/Awesome-LLMs-as-Judges.

People often utilise online media (e.g., Facebook, Reddit) as a platform to express their psychological distress and seek support. State-of-the-art NLP techniques demonstrate strong potential to automatically detect mental health issues from text. Research suggests that mental health issues are reflected in emotions (e.g., sadness) indicated in a person's choice of language. Therefore, we developed a novel emotion-annotated mental health corpus (EmoMent), consisting of 2802 Facebook posts (14845 sentences) extracted from two South Asian countries - Sri Lanka and India. Three clinical psychology postgraduates were involved in annotating these posts into eight categories, including 'mental illness' (e.g., depression) and emotions (e.g., 'sadness', 'anger'). EmoMent corpus achieved 'very good' inter-annotator agreement of 98.3% (i.e. % with two or more agreement) and Fleiss' Kappa of 0.82. Our RoBERTa based models achieved an F1 score of 0.76 and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.77 for the first task (i.e. predicting a mental health condition from a post) and the second task (i.e. extent of association of relevant posts with the categories defined in our taxonomy), respectively.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently shown remarkable perceptual capability in answering visual questions, however, little is known about the limits of their perception. In particular, while prior works have provided anecdotal evidence of MLLMs' sensitivity to object size, this phenomenon and its underlying causes have not been explored comprehensively. In this work, we quantitatively study the perception of small visual objects in several state-of-the-art MLLMs and reveal a pervasive limitation in answering questions about small objects in images. Next, we identify four independent factors that can contribute to this limitation -- object quality, size, distractors, and location -- and conduct controlled intervention studies to measure the effect of each factor on MLLMs' perception. In particular, we find that lower object quality and smaller object size can both independently reduce MLLMs' ability to answer visual questions. More surprisingly, we find that the location of the object in the image and the presence of visual distractors can also significantly reduce MLLMs' question answering accuracy. Our study provides a better understanding of the perceptual limitation of MLLMs and contributes new evaluation protocols for analyzing the perception of future MLLMs. To facilitate further investigations, we release our code and data.

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has transformed the competitive landscape in natural language processing (NLP), particularly for English and other data-rich languages. However, underrepresented languages like Cantonese, spoken by over 85 million people, face significant development gaps, which is particularly concerning given the economic significance of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, and in substantial Cantonese-speaking populations in places like Singapore and North America. Despite its wide use, Cantonese has scant representation in NLP research, especially compared to other languages from similarly developed regions. To bridge these gaps, we outline current Cantonese NLP methods and introduce new benchmarks designed to evaluate LLM performance in factual generation, mathematical logic, complex reasoning, and general knowledge in Cantonese, which aim to advance open-source Cantonese LLM technology. We also propose future research directions and recommended models to enhance Cantonese LLM development.

Mathematical reasoning serves as a cornerstone for assessing the fundamental cognitive capabilities of human intelligence. In recent times, there has been a notable surge in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) geared towards the automated resolution of mathematical problems. However, the landscape of mathematical problem types is vast and varied, with LLM-oriented techniques undergoing evaluation across diverse datasets and settings. This diversity makes it challenging to discern the true advancements and obstacles within this burgeoning field. This survey endeavors to address four pivotal dimensions: i) a comprehensive exploration of the various mathematical problems and their corresponding datasets that have been investigated; ii) an examination of the spectrum of LLM-oriented techniques that have been proposed for mathematical problem-solving; iii) an overview of factors and concerns affecting LLMs in solving math; and iv) an elucidation of the persisting challenges within this domain. To the best of our knowledge, this survey stands as one of the first extensive examinations of the landscape of LLMs in the realm of mathematics, providing a holistic perspective on the current state, accomplishments, and future challenges in this rapidly evolving field.

This paper describes our system developed for SemEval-2024 Task 8, "Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection." Machine-generated texts have been one of the main concerns due to the use of large language models (LLM) in fake text generation, phishing, cheating in exams, or even plagiarizing copyright materials. A lot of systems have been developed to detect machine-generated text. Nonetheless, the majority of these systems rely on the text-generating model, a limitation that is impractical in real-world scenarios, as it's often impossible to know which specific model the user has used for text generation. In this work, we propose a single model based on contrastive learning, which uses ~40% of the baseline's parameters (149M vs. 355M) but shows a comparable performance on the test dataset (21st out of 137 participants). Our key finding is that even without an ensemble of multiple models, a single base model can have comparable performance with the help of data augmentation and contrastive learning.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-level performance on a vast spectrum of natural language tasks. However, few studies have addressed the LLM threat and vulnerability from an ideology perspective, especially when they are increasingly being deployed in sensitive domains, e.g., elections and education. In this study, we explore the implications of GPT soft ideologization through the use of AI-self-consciousness. By utilizing GPT self-conversations, AI can be granted a vision to "comprehend" the intended ideology, and subsequently generate finetuning data for LLM ideology injection. When compared to traditional government ideology manipulation techniques, such as information censorship, LLM ideologization proves advantageous; it is easy to implement, cost-effective, and powerful, thus brimming with risks.

There has recently been a surge of work in explanatory artificial intelligence (XAI). This research area tackles the important problem that complex machines and algorithms often cannot provide insights into their behavior and thought processes. XAI allows users and parts of the internal system to be more transparent, providing explanations of their decisions in some level of detail. These explanations are important to ensure algorithmic fairness, identify potential bias/problems in the training data, and to ensure that the algorithms perform as expected. However, explanations produced by these systems is neither standardized nor systematically assessed. In an effort to create best practices and identify open challenges, we provide our definition of explainability and show how it can be used to classify existing literature. We discuss why current approaches to explanatory methods especially for deep neural networks are insufficient. Finally, based on our survey, we conclude with suggested future research directions for explanatory artificial intelligence.

We present MEGA-Bench, an evaluation suite that scales multimodal evaluation to over 500 real-world tasks, to address the highly heterogeneous daily use cases of end users. Our objective is to optimize for a set of high-quality data samples that cover a highly diverse and rich set of multimodal tasks, while enabling cost-effective and accurate model evaluation. In particular, we collected 505 realistic tasks encompassing over 8,000 samples from 16 expert annotators to extensively cover the multimodal task space. Instead of unifying these problems into standard multi-choice questions (like MMMU, MMBench, and MMT-Bench), we embrace a wide range of output formats like numbers, phrases, code, \LaTeX, coordinates, JSON, free-form, etc. To accommodate these formats, we developed over 40 metrics to evaluate these tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks, MEGA-Bench offers a fine-grained capability report across multiple dimensions (e.g., application, input type, output format, skill), allowing users to interact with and visualize model capabilities in depth. We evaluate a wide variety of frontier vision-language models on MEGA-Bench to understand their capabilities across these dimensions.

We present an empirical evaluation of various outputs generated by nine of the most widely-available large language models (LLMs). Our analysis is done with off-the-shelf, readily-available tools. We find a correlation between percentage of memorized text, percentage of unique text, and overall output quality, when measured with respect to output pathologies such as counterfactual and logically-flawed statements, and general failures like not staying on topic. Overall, 80.0% of the outputs evaluated contained memorized data, but outputs containing the most memorized content were also more likely to be considered of high quality. We discuss and evaluate mitigation strategies, showing that, in the models evaluated, the rate of memorized text being output is reduced. We conclude with a discussion on potential implications around what it means to learn, to memorize, and to evaluate quality text.

In this paper, we evaluate different abilities of GPT-4V including visual understanding, language understanding, visual puzzle solving, and understanding of other modalities such as depth, thermal, video, and audio. To estimate GPT-4V's performance, we manually construct 656 test instances and carefully evaluate the results of GPT-4V. The highlights of our findings are as follows: (1) GPT-4V exhibits impressive performance on English visual-centric benchmarks but fails to recognize simple Chinese texts in the images; (2) GPT-4V shows inconsistent refusal behavior when answering questions related to sensitive traits such as gender, race, and age; (3) GPT-4V obtains worse results than GPT-4 (API) on language understanding tasks including general language understanding benchmarks and visual commonsense knowledge evaluation benchmarks; (4) Few-shot prompting can improve GPT-4V's performance on both visual understanding and language understanding; (5) GPT-4V struggles to find the nuances between two similar images and solve the easy math picture puzzles; (6) GPT-4V shows non-trivial performance on the tasks of similar modalities to image, such as video and thermal. Our experimental results reveal the ability and limitations of GPT-4V and we hope our paper can provide some insights into the application and research of GPT-4V.

How capable are large language models (LLMs) in the domain of taxation? Although numerous studies have explored the legal domain in general, research dedicated to taxation remain scarce. Moreover, the datasets used in these studies are either simplified, failing to reflect the real-world complexities, or unavailable as open source. To address this gap, we introduce PLAT, a new benchmark designed to assess the ability of LLMs to predict the legitimacy of additional tax penalties. PLAT is constructed to evaluate LLMs' understanding of tax law, particularly in cases where resolving the issue requires more than just applying related statutes. Our experiments with six LLMs reveal that their baseline capabilities are limited, especially when dealing with conflicting issues that demand a comprehensive understanding. However, we found that enabling retrieval, self-reasoning, and discussion among multiple agents with specific role assignments, this limitation can be mitigated.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) hold substantial promise across various domains, from personal assistance in daily tasks to sophisticated applications like medical diagnostics. However, their capabilities have limitations in the video game domain, such as challenges with scene understanding, hallucinations, and inaccurate descriptions of video game content, especially in open-source models. This paper describes the development of VideoGameBunny, a LLaVA-style model based on Bunny, specifically tailored for understanding images from video games. We release intermediate checkpoints, training logs, and an extensive dataset comprising 185,259 video game images from 413 titles, along with 389,565 image-instruction pairs that include image captions, question-answer pairs, and a JSON representation of 16 elements of 136,974 images. Our experiments show that our high quality game-related data has the potential to make a relatively small model outperform the much larger state-of-the-art model LLaVa-1.6-34b (which has more than 4x the number of parameters). Our study paves the way for future research in video game understanding on tasks such as playing, commentary, and debugging. Code and data are available at https://videogamebunny.github.io/